


Now That the Magic's Gone

by telm_393



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Confessions, Established Relationship, F/M, Flashbacks, Friendship, Gen, Heart-to-Hearts, Heavy Angst, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, John Constantine-Centric, Mental Health Issues, Post-Season/Series 05, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Self-Blame, Self-Harm - Scratching, Self-Hatred, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:01:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 55,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26941810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: After the Loom and Sara’s brief abduction, things settle down for the Legends. Including John, who might actually be happy, right up until things go absurdly wrong for him on a minor solo mission, and he’s left shaken. No, he doesn’t know why he’s surprised either.What’s surprising is how his unexpectedly stable relationship with Zari keeps being unexpectedly stable in spite of everything. And how the other Legends, once they find out, throw a spanner in his inevitable downward spiral thanks to their well-meaning, though often painfully awkward and occasionally misguided, support. So that’s...well, it’s not as bad as it could be.
Relationships: John Constantine & Ava Sharpe, John Constantine & Behrad Tomaz | Behrad Tarazi, John Constantine & Mick Rory, John Constantine & Nate Heywood, John Constantine & Sara Lance, John Constantine/Zari Tarazi
Comments: 41
Kudos: 89





	1. Here's How It Happened

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome! Please mind the tags. This fic is exactly what it says it is, and though it starts after the non-con takes place, the actual rape is described obliquely through flashbacks, and the story is about what comes after and isn’t really smooth sailing. 
> 
> Additional warnings: alcohol abuse and references to past canonical child abuse. 
> 
> Thank you to within_a_dream and intearsaboutrobots! They were/are both instrumental to the writing of this fic as alpha and beta readers, and they are also my built-in audience of two. Special shout-out to intearsaboutrobots for all the characterization help. 
> 
> I’ve written 30k+ of this fic, so it's not a traditional WIP as such (since I don’t trust myself with one). What’s not written yet is getting written while the finished parts are being edited and posted. Basically, I’m keeping ahead of the chapters. I will admit it’s gotten out of control, and I keep having ideas and adding scenes to my outlines/chapters, but again, I have a good 30k+ of this fic down, so abandonment is not in the cards unless there is a catastrophe.
> 
> I'll update once a week on Saturdays, but I'm posting the first two chapters together because the first chapter is so short and this author's note is so long. The rest will be posted individually. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John has a bad day.

It starts, as many shit things that are John’s fault do, with a demon.

Just an ordinary possession, and it’s easy for John to swear blind that he can get it sorted on his own, because he can, even though Sara and Zari both point out that he’s been day-drinking. 

It’s true. Before the daemonium ex machina decided to emerge from the depths of Hell right when most of the other Legends were dealing with their own mess, John, assuming his services wouldn’t be needed this mission, had decided to indulge in some whiskey. Good news is that it’s not an issue, because, while he’s sent more than one demon back to Hell while sloshed, he’s not even tipsy yet, though he gets the feeling no one quite believes him, since Sara tells him to call for back-up if he needs it. 

He assures her that he won’t, and the Legends direct John towards the inconvenient demon and deal with the mission. 

John, for his part, finds a nice, quiet room in which to lock himself and the demon—who is inaptly named Magister, which he lets John know after about three seconds—and gets the whole thing over with. 

It’s all very normal. Another exorcism, another day in the life. Or another day in the life, another exorcism. Whichever.

It’s the easiest mission he’s ever been sent on in his time with the Legends. He’s being asked to do the job he’s done for decades now, and not even he can mess that up. He doesn’t call Gary, since he’s more interested in getting it over with than creating a teachable moment, and he doesn't call for back-up after all.

He handles it. 

He doesn’t spend more time locked in that room than he’d planned after a rubber-soled boot to the solar plexus ends up propelling him against the wall so hard that his head swims and his words slur. He doesn’t get overpowered, because he’s John Constantine and John Constantine doesn’t get overpowered by some random demon fresh off the streets of Hell who was just bright enough to possess an escaped prisoner who was mostly muscle but not bright enough to do anything with his new embodiedness but look for a good time. 

He gave his name to John while monologuing like a Bond villain, for Christ’s sake, and John doesn’t get overpowered by any creature that stupid, so nothing out of the ordinary happens. John just sends the demon back to Hell and leaves the recently-un-possessed prisoner crumpled on the floor, too exhausted after his completely standard exorcism to care about a criminal potentially on the loose. Better than a demon.

John gives his teammates a triumphant smile when he gets back to the Waverider. He accepts Nate’s high-five, and gloats, “See? No need for back-up.”

(He’s spent plenty of time without back-up anyway. That he’s still on the ship at all is a concession, he tells himself, anyone who’ll listen, and several people who won’t, because he’ll just get dragged back into their nonsense at some point, and he might as well get room and board out of it. He even says it to Zari once, when they’re in bed together, and she covers his mouth with her hand and says, “I know, I know, you walk alone, you don’t totally already own an apartment you could live in instead of here, shut up and go to sleep.”)

He swans back to his room, waving off any questions about his side mission and Ava’s concern about the blood in his hair. She asks whether he got a head wound, and he tells her he didn’t. 

A head wound would’ve been what disoriented him enough to get grabbed by the demon, so there’s no way that happened.

John closes the door to his room and slumps against it. For the first time he admits that his body aches, and badly, but he doesn’t mind; he’s used to pain. 

Except there’s a sharp pain between his legs that he hasn’t been used to for at least over a decade, and he realizes with a wince that he’s bleeding into his pants, which is disgusting, and when he touches his head he finds that Ava’s right. He does have a head wound. 

He asks, reluctantly, “If I’d hypothetically had an unenthusiastic shag with a demon possessing an escaped prisoner, d’you think I could’ve got STDs, Gideon?”

“I can check if you come to medical,” Gideon tells him. “I can heal the damage from the blow to your head too.” 

“Can you do it later?” John asks.  
  
Gideon says, “A head injury is usually time-sensitive, Mr. Constantine.”

“Just a few hours.” Until there's no one to see the full extent of his injuries. "Once everyone's asleep, love, yeah? You'll know, right?"

“Yes, Mr. Constantine,” Gideon says, sounding a bit disapproving, and she might say something else, but John’s not paying much attention. He’s not paying much attention to anything. Most of his body hurts. He sinks into it.

Someone knocks on his door. “I’m tired,” he tells them. “Sod off.”

It’s Ava, and, to her credit, she does sod off after he tells her that yeah, of course he’s gonna get the head wound he “obviously got” healed before it sets, he’ll listen to Gideon like a good boy when she starts badgering him about it in earnest. 

And that night, as promised, John goes to medical when most everyone’s asleep, and Gideon fixes him right up.

+

If anyone asks, John wasn’t afraid.

Not that anyone’s going to ask.

+

John turns out the lights in his room-slash-what-was-definitely-originally-a-storage-space when he tries to sleep, but jerks awake after a few minutes to see the shadows writhing and smiling as they inch their way towards him. His breath catches. They could overpower him, and he’d let them, too. He’d let them let their guard down, and then he’d banish them, just like before, right? 

(Disgusting.) 

It was dark and the demon was strong and John really _wasn’t_ tipsy, but it didn’t matter because he started feeling like he was anyway, tipsy and then worse, with his head bleeding and a huge hand over his mouth and nose. 

John sits up in bed and swallows down bile.

“There’s nothing in the shadows, you idiot,” he mutters to himself.

He turns the lights on. 

+

The important part is that John did what he does best. 

(Oh, what is that? Fuck up?)

His god _damned_ job.

+

In the library, John feels someone wrap their arms around him from behind, holding tight. There’s lips brushing his skin, someone’s hot breath against his cheek—

He struggles to his feet, ears ringing and head pounding, and he shakes it off, chuckling darkly. Shouldn’t have gotten caught off-guard like that, should’ve made sure to dodge all those flailing limbs that are part and parcel of any exorcism, but it’s all right. He’ll finish this whole thing off and no one’ll have to know. The cross he was using before is smashed on the floor, but it’s fine. He’s got more than a few hidden on him.

Before he can reach for anything, even just to turn on the comm in the pocket of his coat, there are arms wrapped around him from behind, squeezing so tight he gasps; that good ol’ demonic strength. Rank breath moistens his cheek, and John hisses with consternation, grabbing the demon’s arms, but before he can even take a breath, a huge hand is pressed over his face, and he can’t say a word, and—

John goes rigid and jerks forward, freeing himself of the arms around him, and turns in his chair, an incantation on his lips. 

But it’s just Zari, who presumably came around to not-so-politely initiate a shag like she has plenty of times before, in spite of Nate’s frequent reminders that that is so not what the library’s for, guys. John’s heart is beating wildly, and Zari looks taken aback. There’s what he thinks is concern in her eyes, or hurt. He doesn’t know; he looks away too quickly to tell.

“What’s going on with you?” she demands, circling around him to lean against the desk just beside him, and John feels sick to his stomach. The words make it sound like she’s felt there’s something going on with him for longer than only this moment. He didn’t know she’d noticed. 

He tries for a smile. He doesn’t think Zari’s very impressed.

“Nothing going on, love,” John tells her. “Just the usual.”

“What's the usual today?" Zari asks, voice teasing.

 _Oh, brooding, the doom and gloom everyone’s always on about, that usual,_ he swallows back, and he says, “Just tired from the mission.”

Zari arches a brow at him, and usually he finds her impressive observational skills, well, impressive, but right now he wishes she’d focus on anything but him.

Her eyes travel down his body and fix on a bruise peeking out of the collar of his shirt, something he hadn’t even noticed. She reaches out and pulls at his collar. John’s heart is beating in his throat. He wants to lean into her touch, and he wants to lean away. He takes a third option and freezes, letting her work his shirt open just enough to see the beginning of an ugly raw mark from where his bare skin was pushed against concrete before he pulls away and re-adjusts his clothes, undoing and redoing his tie. 

"Uh, how much did you get knocked around?" Zari asks, wrinkling her nose, and John shrugs.

"Hardly any."

“Why didn’t you ask Gideon to take a look at those?” 

“Ah, she fixed my head, and the rest...who has the bloody time, right?” _Especially since I also had her to check me for STDs and heal the cracked ribs and rectal tears I got, humiliating as that was._ He swallows that last bit back. He’s good at swallowing all sorts of things. The thought makes him laugh, even though it’s not funny, and Zari eyes him like he’s crazy. 

“Seriously, John, is there something wrong?” she asks, hopping onto the desk, crossing one leg over the other. 

“Not a thing, love,” John says genially, and Zari seems to decide to take him at face value. 

She smooths a hand over his hair until it rests at the nape of his neck, and his racing heart slows down. It’s just Zari. 

He considers trying to re-initiate what she was going for earlier, but he thinks he’s ruined the mood. Ah, well. Later. Tomorrow, maybe. Or the day after.

Zari removes her hand but stays perched on the desk next to him, prodding at her phone while John pretends to do work. Really he’s just reading a spellbook that is currently useless to him, but no one has to know that. Zari doesn’t have to know that. 

He wonders if she’s going to make a move again, and the thought fills him with tension. 

She doesn’t, though, just presses a gentle kiss to the crown of his head after a bit and heads out, saying something about not waiting around to get her beauty sleep if he’s not DTF, whatever that means, and for once he’s relieved that he doesn’t have to have sex. He doesn’t think about why he’s thinking of sex as a _have to_ thing rather than a _get to_ thing for the first time in years and certainly for the first time with Zari, but he’s soon convinced that it’s what he needs to get past this mess.

_Tomorrow, maybe. Or the day after._

He could swear that the shadows at the corners of the library are moving. 

+

“Don’t heal all the bruises,” he said in the medbay. “Not the—the superficial ones, yeah?”

“May I ask why, Mr. Constantine?”

He was drunk enough that he was willing to tell her, “Just think they need more time to heal, is all, and when they’re done, they’ll...” he searched for the words. “They’ll be done. I’ll be done. They won’t hurt anymore.”

“Ah, I see. You are not talking about the bruises."

John frowned. “What? Yes I am. Keep up, Gideon.”

“My apologies, Mr. Constantine,” Gideon said in a dry voice.

“Oh, bugger off," was John's response, and at least Gideon did.

+

Here is what John tells himself.

Or, rather, here is the truth.

John got caught off-guard when he’d barely begun a routine exorcism. That he’ll admit. He screwed up exactly like he never screws up, which was an embarrassment and nearly a disaster, but it didn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, because in the end he got the job done. 

The demon beat up on him some first, but it didn’t phase him. He waited it out, and then when the demon thought he’d won, John dragged himself to his feet and performed the exorcism, feeling nothing. He watched the solid, unfamiliar body writhe on the floor, and the demon went back to Hell, and he let the criminal scurry off into the night because he’s an arsehole who loves chaos. 

That’s what happened, and there’s no one to tell John any different.

+

John’s not sure how long it’s been since the whole thing happened. He only knows it’s been far too long for him to not be _DTF_ (he asked Behrad what it meant), and he’s come to the conclusion that he and Zari have to shag. 

If he doesn’t, she’ll think there’s something going on. She already thinks there’s something going on; an uncomfortable number of the Legends seem to. John wants to go back to his flat and hole up there, but he knows it’s too late now. The Legends are already suspicious. Even Gary’s suspicious—he’s ventured far enough to ask him _is there something wrong?_ in that voice he also uses with his pet bunny _—_ so John’s well and truly showed his hand, and he has to make up for it by doing something normal, and shagging Zari? Yeah, that’s normal.

Before this thing happened, he and Zari shagged almost every night and often multiple times a day. They even slept in the same room most of the time, usually Zari’s because she doesn’t like his, and lately John thinks about that a lot. He wishes he could have Zari next to him when he’s lying awake, which, to his relief, means that he wants to shag. He slept better when he was sleeping next to Zari because the sex tired him out. Because he’s insatiable. 

John doesn’t know why everything he tells himself sounds so robotic these days. He’s never been much for technology.

Even so, that night, the night he’s decided is the one before he and Zari shag again, John sits on the floor of his room with his back to the wall and asks Gideon, “Can you guess things?”

“I am adept at deduction,” Gideon responds, which is a yes.

“Have you guessed what happened to me?” John asks as he watches the door for nothing and nobody, and then he asks, “Can you guess what I’m talking about, when I say that?”

“I believe so,” Gideon says. She pauses for a moment, as if politely waiting for John to continue the conversation, but he already asked his question. She seems to realize that, and keeps on. “It was not very hard to figure out, Mr. Constantine, considering both your injuries and demeanor at the time.” 

“What d’you think you figured out, then?” John asks. He has a headache. He takes a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and slides one out with shaking hands. 

“That you were sexually assaulted on the last mission,” Gideon replies.

John appreciates the matter-of-factness, but he still goes tense without meaning to, his muscles contracting. “No I wasn’t,” he says, disappointment churning so violently in his gut that he wants to be sick. His voice comes out weak.

Gideon pauses for a beat, and then: “Mr. Constantine, if you did not want the truth, why did you ask?”

John licks his lips. He lights his cigarette with a distracted incantation. For the first time in a while, he takes a drag. He doesn’t answer the question, but he does say, “I’ll fix it tomorrow.”

Gideon doesn’t ask how he’s planning to do that, which John’s thankful for.

He thinks the answer might sound stupid if he says it out loud.


	2. DTF

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zari finds out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Really can't exaggerate how much intearsaboutrobots helped me out with the conversation between John and Zari here.

John stands in front of Zari’s door. 

Last night, he told Gideon he was going to fix things, and he’s not going to go back on that, especially since he wants to be here. 

John takes a deep breath and dredges up the energy to knock. 

He’s not the only one with energy, as it turns out. Zari opens the door almost immediately, and he grins and so does she as she grabs his tie and pulls him inside. He kicks the door closed and she kisses him hard, pushing him onto the bed and straddling him, leaning down to kiss him again. Her black hair brushes at his face and feels silk-soft under his fingers. She tastes like the remnants of her pomegranate-flavored lipstick. 

When she sits back a bit to unbutton her dress, she’s a blur, but at least she’s a blur that looks nothing like the demon’s suit, who had short, thinning hair the same color John’s used to be, who tasted like cigarettes and unbrushed teeth and had skin that wasn’t nearly as exfoliated and was a man. A man who pushed him to the ground and got on top of him and covered his mouth and unzipped his trousers and it all just went downhill from there. 

Even before she finishes getting her dress off, just with her sleeves over her shoulders, Zari leans back down to kiss John again, and that’s all right. It’s all right. He puts his hands on her waist and she smiles against his lips. She breaks the kiss to nibble at his ear, and he can feel himself shaking. Taking stock of himself with some effort, John notes that he’s hard, and it’s a relief. Then again, he was hard when it happened too, though he didn’t want to be. It’s one of those things he’s always resented about the human body, his human body: how it does things without his bidding. 

Zari shifts just enough to start unbuttoning John’s shirt, and his breath shudders. Disjointed thoughts stumble through his mind.

He doesn’t feel right. 

It’s too late to stop now. 

He’ll feel better soon. 

This moment is fixable. 

He slips his hands under Zari’s dress and she’s distracted, grinding against him and moving to kiss his neck.

“Well, you’re eager tonight,” John says, hardly processing the words, but saying them means he can say something and that’s a comfort, at least. All of this is a comfort. His head feels like it’s full of nails scratching against his skull, his body like it’s dawdling in choosing between fight and flight, and he’s on the Waverider and neither fight or flight is going to do anything for him, so he just keeps on. He’s doing well so far, he tells himself. Zari’s not noticed that anything’s wrong—nothing is wrong—and soon this is going to feel good. 

Zari kisses her way up his neck, and her lips brush against his cheek again. She lets out a sound like a growl or a purr. Her breath is hot against his face and smells like mint. John rolls his hips up and says, “Makes me sorry I can’t always be at your beck and call, princess.” 

That makes Zari laugh, a little embarrassed, and she pulls away to look at him. She covers his mouth with her hand and playfully says, “Ugh, stop.” 

John stops.

(And it all goes downhill from there.) 

Usually when she covers his mouth like that, he’ll lick her hand, and she’ll make a sound of exaggerated disgust and say “that’s _so gross”_ and he’ll laugh and they’ll go back to what they were doing, but there’s a hand over his mouth and nose, heavy and calloused, and he’s starting to think he’s going to suffocate here in a concrete former laundry room and it’s going to be his fault. He’s going to die of a botched exorcism, of all things. For all the jokes he’s made, he never thought a demon would actually take him out like this, but here he is. 

Then the hand not covering his face moves down to his trousers, and John knows exactly what this demon’s hoping for. He puts up a struggle, but realizes early on that that isn’t going to work. He’ll just tire himself out, and then he won’t even be able to perform the sodding exorcism, and that’s not the kind of indignity he wants to survive. So he stops fighting, and it’s the easiest way through it anyhow. Sometimes, John has to bide his time because there’s nothing else to do. 

Once the demon’s inside him, the demon’s now-free hand roams all over John’s body, but the other is still over John’s face, and John thinks he’s going to pass out. He uses that to his advantage and pretends he does before it can actually happen. He lies; he’s good at that. He’s good at lying and he’s good at manipulating and he’s good at coming through at the last minute and he’s going to be able to fight back soon and—his fingers scrape at satin, and he realizes that he can’t. He can’t fight back, not now, because he’s lying on soft sheets, not concrete, and he’s gotten mixed up. 

His head feels empty, like his brain’s been put through a blender and poured out for some infernal creature to drink, and all his breaths are caught in his chest and he can’t force them out. 

With no other options, John takes the broken pieces of this moment and puts them together.

The hand over his mouth is soft, not calloused, and the pressure is light, and it’s not covering his nose. It’s a much smaller hand than the one he remembers. Or it _was,_ rather, because the hand is gone by now, which John should’ve noticed right off, but he doesn’t even know how long it’s been gone. It doesn’t feel gone, is the thing, or at least _a_ hand doesn’t. Somehow he’s still gagged with someone else’s skin, and he struggles to take in a breath.

John looks up at the person straddling his waist, the button-up top of her blue dress undone, her sleeves hanging off of her shoulders and one bra strap slipping down too. She has a familiar face. John’s seen demons with familiar faces before, but with some effort he notes that her eyes, big and dark and warm, show who she is. She’s herself, and that’s all.

 _Zari, Zari, Zari,_ he chants in his head like an incantation. _Zari, just Zari, she wouldn’t hurt you. Would she?_

Even lying flat, he feels dizzy. He braces himself for Zari to keep going, but instead she sits back, all the way back so he can’t even feel her hair against him anymore, and his hands slip off of her hips. 

She says something, though John can’t make out what. She feels heavy, even though he knows that in real life, in this moment, it’d be easy to push her away. 

Not like before, but before is still crushing him.

John can’t move, and for once he has no idea what to do.

At least this time he was the one to get hurt. That counts for something, and possibly everything. He can be glad for that.

His breathing is shallow. There’s a hand on his chest. 

“John?” Zari’s saying. 

Yes, that is, in fact, his name, though—much to Zari’s concern and somewhat to John’s—he doesn’t respond to it. He wonders, for a nonsensical moment, if he should pretend to pass out, and then strikes the idea. That wouldn’t make sense, because this is different.

This is different in so many ways, it always was. It was a good plan. He could keep Zari happy and make sure no one suspected anything and get through it all and show himself that everything’s just dandy, because this doesn’t have to change anything.

John’s kicked more than one man in the bollocks for touching him where he didn’t want to be touched. He was with a few people who kept going when his body went tense or limp in his misspent, desperate youth. He’s been thrown to the ground and grabbed. The difference is that he always managed to get out of it before it went too far, and always managed to pull himself out of any panic after. Brush the dirt off and go on his way and learn how to get through it all.

He has no idea how he let it go so far this time. He has no idea why he still can’t seem to brush it off, even now that he’s moved away from where he ended up (a concrete room with a broken washer and dryer, his mind helpfully recalls) to somewhere different. Somewhere normal. Somewhere comfortable. 

He was comfortable. 

Zari’s kneeling next to him, her hands on his shoulders, his chest, his hair. “John? John, what’s going on?”

He sits up. His chest is heaving and he’s staring at Zari, trying to recognize her even though he already recognizes her. It’s a strange feeling, knowing where he is and knowing who he is and who she is and not knowing at the same time. It’s the kind of feeling he would’ve appreciated in that dim concrete room.

“Zari,” he says faintly. 

He puts a shaking hand to her cheek, and she’s looking at him like he’s crazy, like he needs talking down. “John?”

 _"Zari,”_ he repeats, because apparently they’re just saying each other’s names to each other as if they’re strangers, and then his mouth speaks for him and decides to say, “I had Gideon check me for STDs, don’t worry.” 

Zari pulls back. “What?” She gives him an utterly baffled look that turns into one of dawning betrayal as she picks up on what John’s now decided he was hoping she would. “Wait, you slept with someone else?”

“Never said we was actually together or...what d’you call it? Exclusive,” John points out. It’s rote, though not untrue. It’s mean, too, the kind of mean that’ll distract Zari. It's already distracting her. There’s hurt building behind her eyes.

“When, John?” she asks. “Wait, was it when you were…exorcising or whatever? Last mission? You went and slept with someone?”

“Slept with is a bit generous,” John says. 

He doesn’t know what he’s trying to do anymore, not as much as he thought he did roughly twenty seconds ago. He wants Zari to go away, he doesn’t want Zari to go away. He wants to tell her, he doesn’t want to tell her. He wants her to hate him for the wrong reasons, he wants her to hate him for the right ones. It’s a rare exorcism that’s actually hard for him, and a completely routine one went sideways and now the world’s upside fucking down and John doesn’t know if he can act like it’s not. 

(John Constantine, everyone. 

Run away while you still can.) 

Zari stumbles her way off of the bed and, shaken, starts to button her dress. “Seriously, John?” she asks, betrayal bleeding into her voice. “Okay, thanks for letting me know like five days later when we were about to _have sex_.”

“It hasn’t been long, then,” John says, mostly to himself, and Zari makes a breathy little sound like she’s just noticed she’s been injured. 

“Hasn’t been long?” she repeats. Her eyes shine, but she seems to decide to be angry instead of tearful as she begins to ramble, though her voice trembles. “No, it’s a pretty long time to not tell me that you went off and...and _screwed_ someone else, like—where? At a bar or something? How trashed were you? Weren’t you _injured?_ Wow, John.”

Zari shakes her head and lets out a high-pitched, tremulous laugh. “No wonder you haven’t been _interested_ lately. You’re not into me anymore, I guess, fine, I’m not enough for you, fine, but you could’ve mentioned it,” she says, her voice brittle, and John didn’t mean it like that, but she’s ranting and it’s hard to stop Zari once she gets started; he likes that about her. “I mean, I know we’re not official or whatever, but come _on._ You know I’ve...you know people have done this to me before, I thought you’d…I don’t know, John. I don’t know what I thought.”

Zari’s words are clipped and intense until the last bit, which sounds so sad that John’s heart aches. John’s struck a nerve and struck it hard, all the holes in his story filled out by Zari’s own emotions. He feels a sick mix of guilt and accomplishment at the thought. 

Now Zari knows _an_ ugly truth, if not _the_ ugly truth, and John can just go.

Sat on the side of the bed, John lets Zari’s words wash over him and notices that his shirt is mostly unbuttoned. His hands shake as he tries to get it done back up. He doesn’t know why he’s even trying. He’s usually more than all right with being naked, let alone half unbuttoned. He runs his fingers over his neck, where the bruises are starting to turn yellow and fade, and Zari’s lost to him and John feels a brief surge of panic as the room falls silent except for the sound of Zari taking deep breaths.

Except for the sound of Zari trying not to cry. 

She’ll be gone soon, thinking that John doesn’t give a damn, and the one good thing about this whole sorry mess, at least in hindsight, was supposed to be that no one else got hurt, and this isn’t what he wanted, he didn’t want to make her cry, and in a split second he desperately needs her to know that. 

Voice pressured, John says, “Can’t believe that after so many years, a demon got the jump on me like that.”

Zari freezes. 

John’s actually a bit taken aback, since he didn’t think she’d care about anything he had to say. She’d started pacing at some point, arms wrapped around herself, but now she really looks at him again, studying his face, standing very still. John ducks his head a bit. 

Unsure of how to continue the conversation now that he’s successfully annihilated their relationship, he says, “Oh, don’t let me keep you. I cheated, after all.” At the very least, he went off and had sex when they’d never had the relationship talk that John’s smart enough to know Zari’d like to have and probably deserves. 

Zari just stares at him, blinking as though she’s trying to see through a fog, and her eyes narrow, her brittle anger breaking into suspicion, and John gives up on whatever it is he wants and waits to see what she’ll do. 

What she does is announce, “You’re lying.” She lets out a brief, thin laugh. “Literally what the hell, John? Why?”

“I’m not lying,” John responds. He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees, and for some reason he keeps talking. “Not really. Though it depends on what you think we are, or what you think cheating is. I wouldn’t count it, but what do I know?” To himself, he mutters, “Still shagging someone else, ain’t it?” 

Zari’s response to his musing is silence, and John stares down at the floor. 

He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He hasn’t been so mixed up in a long time, but that’s how it goes with him. He lives with it all until something happens that his mind won’t let him live with, and a part of him snaps, all of a sudden, not suddenly at all, and some fabrication he’s told himself and everyone else crumples and reality overwhelms him. 

“John, I don’t get it. You’re not telling me something. Why?” Zari trails off for a second, and then she says, a little to him and a little to herself, “This is _not_ what a man acts like when he’s caught cheating.” He thinks that there may be relief in her voice, and doesn’t want to break the news that what she doesn’t know is worse than what he was going to let her think.

“Maybe it’s what this man acts like,” John mumbles. “And I didn’t get caught doing anything, I told you.” _You absolute idiot_ , the part of himself that isn’t intent on digging himself into a ditch tells him, and yet he keeps on. “I fucked up, and here I am. Here we are. Zari, it’s not that I don’t want you. I just don’t bloody deserve you. I don’t deserve any of this.”

Zari’s expression has changed to what might be fear and her arms aren’t wrapped as tightly around herself, her body not so closed off to him anymore. 

“John? Tell me what’s wrong.” Her voice is delicate and wary, but she doesn’t look ready to leave anymore. 

She looks like she’s waiting for him. 

John grimaces. He thinks he might’ve ruined his attempt to push her out the door, and suddenly he’s not sure if he even wanted to in the first place. 

(Also, it’s her room, so there were some flaws built into this plan from the start.) 

“He had his hand over my mouth,” John informs her, unable to stop himself. He needs her to know it’s not about her. “I couldn’t talk. Nothing. Just came out all muffled, mostly didn’t come out at all.” A twitchy smile flits over John’s face. “What’d I tell you, love? Back at my house? I’m the greatest sorcerer who ever lived?” John snorts. “Greatest sorcerer who ever lived, felled by the hand of some idiot demon, and all I could do was bide my time and take it ‘til I could get myself together.” 

“ _J_ _ohn,_ ” Zari says, voice very quiet, and ah, there she is, putting the pieces together. Took her a minute, but John didn’t expect his particular situation to be her first guess, and really, Zari was always going to be too smart to buy it forever. John’s not doing so well at lying. 

John feels a grin spread across his face, because it’s what his muscles do and he guesses his muscles can do whatever they want. “Yeah, love?”

“What happened at the exorcism? Like, what _exactly_ happened at the exorcism?”

“I did my job,” John says, because he can’t stand to tell her what exactly happened. “I just didn’t do it well. Can’t believe I let him bloody ambush me. I made so many novice mistakes.” Let himself slip, is what he did. 

“Oh,” Zari whispers, her hands going to rest on the back of her head. “Oh, no, John.”

“Figured I’d never say a word about it. No offense, love, but it would’ve been easier without you, if I was in my flat instead of this tin can, if you lot didn’t think I’m one of you and you didn’t think I’m worth something. I’d lock myself away for a few weeks, get out good as new. Figure out how to put it all together just how I like it, no interruptions, no—hope.” He rubs his hands together. He needs a cigarette. “Yeah, good as new,” he murmurs. 

(And if he didn’t get out? No one would miss him.)

“John, did you get...” Zari starts, and then she hesitates. She probably doesn’t want to offend him, if she’s wrong, even though she must know by now that she’s not.

John, for his part, starts to regain control of his muscles and clenches his jaw instead of smiling like a madman. He’s said too much. John’s not unwilling to talk about the bad things that have happened to him, the bad things he’s done, but this one feels too close and too humiliating both. It feels like a fresh wound and he doesn’t want to deal with fresh wounds. He doesn’t want to make them bleed through the story he’s scared up since it happened, the one he desperately wants to believe. 

John drags his hands down his face as though he’ll be able to remove the imagined hand over his nose and mouth. His nails catch on the skin of his cheekbone, and he digs into it. There are no hands on his face but his. It’s his own skin under his fingernails. That can give him some relief, at least.

“Wait, John, what are you doing?” Zari, never one to let a bad habit slide, asks sharply. “Stop it!” 

John finishes raking his nails down his face, much to Zari’s displeasure, but at least his hands end up in his lap. He starts rubbing them together again. 

His cheek burns, and he grins up at Zari. “Don’t like what you see?” 

Zari clearly doesn’t, but the hurt and anger and betrayal in her eyes—that’s all well and truly gone. Now it’s distress and concern, again, a deep, genuine kind of concern, if a little wary and lost, as if she wants to help, as if she cares too much about him to leave him like this, and there’s guilt there too, bare on her face, and John doesn’t know how to do anything but hate it.

“It’s late,” John points out, and she shakes her head and runs her fingers through her hair. 

“I don’t really care about that right now, John,” she says.

“What, not worried about your beauty sleep?” John asks, trying to get back into their rhythm, trying to get back the lightness between them, silently begging her to pretend that what just happened never happened. He’s come back to himself, really, except he’s wired and ready to drop all at the same time, though he’d rather die than sleep, and he thinks he's broken yet another unfixable thing.

“John, I’m so sorry,” Zari says in response, and John barks out a surprised laugh.

“And why would you be sorry?”

“I’m sorry I believed you,” Zari says, and John flinches. Zari notices, and stumbles to explain. “No! No, I mean when you kept saying everything was fine, and when you said you cheated on me, after I…” Zari lets out a bemused little laugh, as if she really just can’t believe herself. “After I saw you, I felt you. I stopped because you were scared.”

“I wasn’t scared!” The words come out too loud, uncontrolled, and now Zari’s the one who flinches. John feels a surge of guilt and covers his face, one hand over the other so she won’t notice that he’s trying to scratch himself up again. 

“John, quit it,” Zari says, and John digs his nails in deeper, clawing at his skin, maybe to spite her, _look what you’ve gotten into, Z, you don’t want this kind of pain._

Then there’s hands on his, wrenching them from his face. His head snaps up and he stares at Zari, wide-eyed. 

His hands spasm in hers, but he doesn’t pull away.

A tear slips down her cheek, and he shakes his head when her lip trembles. “Don’t cry, love. Don’t cry.” This whole time, he’s been trying not to hurt her, and he still failed. Typical. “I’ll be all right.”

“Okay,” Zari says, even trying for a smile that’s probably supposed to seem encouraging.

“Do you believe me?” John asks.

Zari nods, and now John doesn’t believe her. 

+

Zari makes John go to medical to get the scratches on his face sorted out. 

At least it’s late enough that no one else sees.

(This time.) 

Everyone’s still asleep, or something like it, because John came down at night and then he and Zari were occupied for—what? Maybe an hour. It feels like it’s been much longer, but it hasn’t. It’s just that it feels like things have changed. Then again, John’s felt like things have changed since his last exorcism. They probably have. 

John isn’t sure what to do. He falters there in medical, wondering where he should go and if Zari, who’s got her feet planted on the ground like she’s trying not to pace, is planning to go with him, because she hasn’t left yet. 

“You look tired, love,” John says, and Zari rolls her eyes.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. Go to sleep.” John swings his legs over the side of the medchair and still can’t figure out what to do. 

“I’m not just going to leave you here,” Zari says, bristling as though John said something cruel. 

John shrugs. “Not leaving me anywhere, love. You know where to find me.”

“So where are you planning to go?” Zari asks, eyebrows raised and arms crossed. She looks vaguely judgmental, but John has to take into account that that’s also what her face looks like a fair amount of the time. 

John shrugs. Where _is_ he planning to go? His house? The New York apartment? 

His house, occupied by Astra, and he’d rather die than have her know what happened. His flat, which everyone can find and which Gary comes in and out of like it’s his own place. John’s life hasn’t been so filled with people who won’t stop poking at him since he was in his twenties, and even then it wasn’t quite so bad. 

(John doesn’t want to be poked right now. He wants some peace. The problem is it’s hard to get it when he's with another person and even harder to feel it when he's alone, and that he is not sure what to do with.) 

His room, then. 

“My room, I guess,” John mumbles.

“I mean,” Zari says in response, hesitating, “do you, like, want to go to your room? And be by yourself?” 

John’s stomach lurches and he says, “Sounds about right.”

“Sounds about right or yes?” Zari asks, and John feels a spark of annoyance.

“Can’t leave well enough alone, can you, love?” he snipes, and she looks distinctly unimpressed.

“Uh, considering that whole thing that literally just happened, no, I can’t. I’m worried about you.”

John groans. “Don’t do that.”

“Don’t worry about you? Don’t tell me how to feel.”

“It’s my problem you’re feeling things about,” John points out. “Wasn’t much of anything, really. What happened. And it was my fault.”

“John, you think that everything bad that has ever happened in, like, your general vicinity is your fault.”

“To be fair, most bad things that have happened in my general vicinity do tend to come back to me, yeah,” John says, and Zari looks at him exasperated. 

“Still think the world revolves around you, huh?”

John snorts. “Guess so.” He wraps his arms around his stomach, hunching over. He feels empty and exhausted. “I need a drink,” he mutters. “I’ll get to sleep like that.”

“Nothing else can help?” Zari asks, and John hunches over a bit more. _You could, maybe, or anyone, in a pinch,_ he swallows back. He wishes he had his coat, but it’s crumpled on the floor of Zari’s room, so he’s just in his shirt and trousers, sans even shoes, like she’s just in her dress. He keeps staring at the hemline. There’s a bruise on her knee. He wonders what she bumped into. 

“And I’m the one with a savior complex,” John says.

Zari sighs. “Touché.”

John gets up, and when he does he stumbles. Zari reaches out to help steady him, and John tenses at her touch. She seems to notice, as if she’s used to his body under her hands and knows when it’s doing something different than usual, and her hand darts away. John thinks he would’ve been all right with it there, after a few moments, but he doesn’t tell her that.

“I’m going to my room,” John mutters, and Zari nods.

“Okay, I’ll just...I’ll go to sleep,” she says with little enthusiasm, and John tries to smile. She tries to smile back. 

They both give up very quickly, even though usually neither of them know a losing battle when they see one.

John makes his way to his room even though it’s the last thing he wants to do, and grabs a bottle of whiskey that’s on his desk, drinking what’s left of it—enough to get him drunk, not enough to give him alcohol poisoning, because he’s more responsible than that these days—as fast as he can.

He gets to sleep, and when he wakes up his hangover barely even counts as a headache, which he considers a win. He turns over in bed and wishes he’d gone through with sex just so he could have Zari with him. 

Last time he felt like that about another person, like he only wanted to sleep with them and have their body there next to his, never mind what came just before, was when he was with Dez, and John swallows bile. 

In the morning, Zari looks exhausted. John definitely looks worse. At least no one mentions it, probably assuming that they were shagging. 

John wishes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 3 - After the Fact  
> Summary: Zari continues to know. John’s doing pretty well, all things considered, and is also really trying to stop doing that thing where he’s self-aware.


	3. After the Fact

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zari continues to know. John’s doing pretty well, all things considered, and is also really trying to stop doing that thing where he’s self-aware.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the feedback! I really appreciate it. :) Hope you enjoy!

John and Zari barely look at each other for a good two days after she finds out, just occasionally exchanging awkward glances and gentle, hesitant touches, all initiated by Zari. It’s easy, at least, to ignore each other. Half-ignore each other. Whatever this is. 

At this point he imagines that the others think they’ve had some kind of row, and John can go with that. They’re not even wrong. There was something like a row, it just didn’t end as one.

John lies awake at night and listens to his own heartbeat and his own breath, swallows and thinks he feels a heavy hand over his face again even though there’s nothing there, of course there’s nothing there, he’s alone. He’s completely alone. His breaths are shallow now and they were shallow then as he panted against a dirty palm, and he puts his hands to his face and drags his nails down, from cheekbones to chin. 

There’s skin under his fingernails again, but it helps him sleep for a little while, knowing he’s just strong enough to get a phantom hand off of him, for whatever that’s worth, which is almost nothing. At least the pain is soothing.

In the morning he forgets he even did it until he goes into the galley and Nate does a double take looking at him.

“Woah, what happened to you?” 

John furrows his brow. “Nothing.” 

“Your face is scratched up,” Nate points out, and John makes a _hm_ sound.

“It was itching,” he says, and he grabs a beer, making sure to keep Nate in his line of sight. Funny how the relief of another human presence can fade into discomfort when he can’t quite see them. 

“It’s like nine in the morning,” Nate says.

“And you can bugger off,” John responds.

“Okay, okay,” Nate says, and then John makes the mistake of looking in the general direction of the huge book Nate’s reading and finds himself trapped in an impromptu lecture about Medieval Britain. 

John makes himself a coffee and cracks an egg in addition to the beer. He even sits down at the table Nate’s at, offering occasional vaguely interested sounds to complement Nate’s prattling. There have been times he’s half-listened to Nate’s delusions of professorship, but right now he’s not up for it. In fact, he’s not sure why he’s still here. Probably the egg and coffee, since he’s so hungry that they’re making him feel sick.

He doesn’t feel like going anywhere else right now either, where he might run into someone who wants to talk about something other than Medieval Britain and where he won’t have a cracking excuse for leaving immediately next time someone comes in. He only has so much patience for human interaction.

He considers pouring his beer into his coffee and then decides that that might be too sad and disgusting even for him, so he just drinks the coffee and eats the egg, sipping the beer between the rest of his meal.

When Ava comes into the galley, John shoots up from his chair, chugs the rest of the beer, and, before he leaves for the library, says, “Good.” 

As he heads out, he overhears Nate say, “Oh, he _super_ wasn’t listening to me, but he stuck around. Reminds me of being a TA!”

John stuck around.

Yeah, he’s been doing that a lot lately. 

+

“Is this going to be a thing?” Zari asks from the door of the library, and John starts, turning his attention to her so quickly that he feels like he gets whiplash from looking up, an impressive feat. 

He’s been all right in here, buried in books, able to forget for a moment, albeit with guilt, that he should be watching himself, alone as he is. He thinks he used to be better at watching himself. He thinks he used to be worse. John wonders, sometimes, if he hasn’t had more good luck than he thought, now that it’s run out. 

_She speaks,_ he swallows back. The words would probably sound bitter out loud, which isn’t fair. It’s still only been days since she found out. Only been weeks since it happened. Not even a month. The thought is crushing. 

“What?” he asks, and her lips turn downward. 

She gestures to his face like Nate did before, and John brushes his fingers over his cheek, over ragged, raw skin. _Is this going to be a thing?_ He shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Let’s go,” Zari says in response, jerking her head in the direction of the door.

John raises his eyebrows. “Where?”

“To medical. So we can—so you can get rid of the scratches.”

The original bruises and scratches and cuts have nearly disappeared by now. His body aches less, but that doesn’t make him feel any better. The shallow wounds on his face, aching but different than any of the ones he got while it happened, those do. 

He doesn’t say anything.

“John,” Zari says. “For real. It could get infected.”

“Ah, you just like me better when I’m handsome,” John says, and Zari rolls her eyes.

“You got me. It’s pure shallowness that I prefer your face intact.”

John rolls his eyes back. “Fine, I’ll go. But only ‘cause I’m flattered that you still care about my rakish looks.” The words are supposed to be flippant, but they get thinner as he speaks them, and an awkward silence shrouds the room in response. He might as well have said, _I’m just flattered that you still care about me,_ and that’s too much too soon _._

Zari’s eyes start to shine, and John feels a stab of panicked guilt. “Wait. I didn’t mean to make you cry, love.”

“I know,” Zari says, her voice shaking, and she blinks very fast. “I know, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” she says again, and John shakes his head. 

“No, love, don’t be sorry, _I’m_ sorry…” John says, even though he’s never been much for sorries, because he doesn’t have anything better to say. “I didn’t mean for any of it to happen, I didn’t mean to hurt you…” And just when they were really starting to have something too, just when he was starting to think that maybe he’d be all right with that, that maybe he was even happy. Bad timing, John’s whole life is bad timing. “I didn’t,” he insists, and Zari waves a hand at him and shakes her head at the same time, all jerky, ungraceful movements. 

“Don’t, please don’t say that,” Zari says, and John feels his stomach drop before she says, “It’s just, I don’t know how to…I’ve never, not like this, I’ve…” She puts her head in her hands, pressing her fingers against her temples, and takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she says again, voice even, and John nearly groans, but he swallows his tongue and lets her speak instead. He can give her that. 

She takes another deep breath and then looks back at John, her arms crossed over her chest. “I don’t know exactly how to react.” John almost interjects, but Zari gives him a pleading look, and he stays silent. “I know you don’t expect me to, okay? But I still wish I did. I wish there was some kind of video to teach me how to be perfect about this. I just want you to know that I’m not mad. I haven’t stopped caring. I know you didn’t mean for it to happen, who means for something like that to happen? I just wish…” Zari looks up at the ceiling, putting a hand over her mouth, and she shakes her head. 

“Wish it hadn’t happened at all?” John suggests to finish the sentence, and Zari’s shoulders droop with relief. “Me too.”

_I wish I hadn’t let it happen at all._

The silence is back now, seeping into every corner of the library, and John looks down and away from Zari because if he looks at her he might love her, and he can’t do that right now when things are so delicate. 

“Will you just go to medical with me?” Zari asks, finally breaking the silence, and John touches the scratches again. They sting. That’s still something of a comfort, but he likes Zari more than the pain, he thinks, so he nods. 

“I’ll go.”

Besides, it’ll be less messy next time he does it, if his face is clear.

+

Zari goes with him to medical. They sit in awkward silence while she seems to wonder if she can hold his hand and he feels miserable that she’s waffling about holding his hand, and the problem is that neither of them are sure how to act. 

It feels like too much, maybe. A disappointment to them both.

It’s a blow, this happening after Sara came back from her abduction relatively unscathed and they were all able to breathe a sigh of relief that these new wounds were fixable. (Not that his aren’t, his mind hastily interjects at the thought. The bruises are fading.) 

In spite of everything, Zari hasn’t broken up with him—funny that until now he’s been ignoring that they were together enough to break up—but, there in medical, John knows there isn’t long left for them, especially as days of almost-silence between them follow. There’s a barrier between them that they couldn’t pull down with too-charged conversations that held sparks of the “surprisingly happy couple” they were told they were. 

John doesn’t even know if he wants to have more conversations. He doesn’t think so. He knows he doesn’t deserve reassurances. 

But then one night not too long after medical, Zari knocks on his door and asks, “Can I come in?”

John doesn’t expect anything but heartbreak from the exchange they’re about to have, but he's so antsy tonight that he’s still relieved at the idea of having someone else with him, someone familiar, someone whose body he knows intimately. He used to prefer being alone, in the end.

Maybe he’s changed.

“Yeah, love, come in.” 

Zari is dressed in one of her silk nightgowns. It’s dark red and the way it hugs her body is distracting, especially since John’s a bit tipsy, though he’s not drinking anymore. There’s a tumbler on the floor. He’s trying to will himself to sleep without dreaming, as if he has a choice, not sure which nightmare is better than the other. He sits up in bed, unconsciously pushing himself into the corner where the bed meets the wall, and blinks the bleariness from his eyes. 

“Zari,” he murmurs. “There something you need?” _Something you want to say? We can deal with it, if you want it all to be over. I can deal with it._

He watches her intently, studying the troubled look on her face. Her arms are crossed. She seems almost shy, which isn’t like her at all. John feels as though he’s on another planet and he and Zari are looking at each other through a telescope. She looks tired. 

“You all right?” he asks, and she cracks a small smile.

“I feel like I should be asking you that question.”

John rolls his eyes. “Course I am. I seem all right, don’t I?” He likes to think he does, or that he at least only seems as much a mess as usual. The question isn’t actually rhetorical, though he already knows the answer he wants, but Zari doesn’t answer it.

She leans back against the closed door and says, “I was wondering,” and then she cuts herself off.

“C’mon, love,” John says. “Just tell me. Whatever it is, I can take it.”

Zari narrows her eyes at him. “It’s not, like, bad. I don’t think it’s bad.” 

John stays silent, because what’s he supposed to do in response to what she just said? Hope? 

“I just...I mean, it’s selfish,” Zari starts, and John sighs.

“Say it. I’m begging you.” The words come out sarcastic, but they’re not untrue. 

Zari sighs too, a frustrated little huff. “I got used to sleeping with you.” She grimaces at the words, as if they came out wrong. 

John feels an ugly pang of humiliation. 

“Yeah, and I got used to sleeping with you.” He snorts. “Just couldn’t get through the good part,” he says, hushed, because he couldn’t. He wanted to sleep with her, but not in the right way. He thought he’d feel better once he got through it, but he still feels slimy and sick and pathetic because he couldn’t. And now it’s been a week and they’re still together and dancing around each other both. He rubs at his forehead.

“I mean,” Zari says, expanding on her statement, “I want to sleep with you.” Again, she seems to regret what she just said, even though John feels a wave of relief. Not everything is lost, then. “It’s okay if you can’t,” she says, and John feels his stomach twist. “I get it, I was just wondering if you wanted to...it’s dumb, I shouldn’t. Push.”

 _Can’t._ John isn’t going to deal with that word. He pulls in a harsh breath. Zari’s willing to try again. She really does still want to be with him, and he can’t mess this up too. 

“You’re fine, love,” he says, and he stands. He might be a little drunk, but he might also be dizzy. He smiles at her, and she seems to study his face as he walks over to her and, without thinking, takes her head in his hands and kisses her. 

There’s surprise in the curve of her body, but she wraps her arms around him and kisses back. He closes his eyes and moves one of his hands to her hair, running his fingers through it, and he forgets about everything but Zari. He’s light-headed with the taste of her, the scent of her, vanilla and cinnamon, and when they break apart, he leans his forehead against hers, closing his eyes. 

_All right, Johnny,_ he tells himself. _This is good. Time to go for it._

He trails his hand down to rest on her hip, and she gently pulls away, taking a couple of steps back. She removes his hand and holds it in hers. “You’re shaking,” she murmurs, and John looks down and laughs, because she’s right. He’s bloody shaking. 

“Why’d you stop?” he asks, and he’s not sure if he’s asking about now or then. If they’d been able to push through, maybe he’d be better now.

“John, we don’t have to do anything,” Zari says, and John shakes his head.

“You just said you wanted to sleep together,” he grits out, and Zari gives him an exasperated look tinged with what he hopes isn’t sadness.

“Get your mind out of the gutter,” she says, shoving his shoulder. “I just meant sleep with you like sleep in the same bed. Not sex. We don’t have to have sex.”

John pulls away from her and crosses his arms across his chest, turning away to the side. “Ain’t a matter of have to, love. I like sex. So do you.” 

“Uh, yeah, I really do,” Zari says, “but not with a guy who’s only doing it because he feels like he has to. I’m not into that, and I’m not going to have sex with you until _you_ tell me you’re ready and _I_ believe you.” 

John grimaces and finally bucks up and says, “You deserve more than that.” 

He doesn’t know what he expects in response, but whatever it is, it’s not what he gets. Full of surprises, Zari is.

(John thinks, with a twinge of sheepish guilt, that he might’ve been underestimating her, or at least underestimating what they have.)

“No, I don’t deserve better or whatever,” Zari says, a bit of frustration in her voice.

“Don’t go selling yourself short, love,” John says, voice sharp, because he hates it when she does that, the moments she puts herself down with an almost elegant subtlety.

“I’m not,” Zari says with equal indignation. “I’m talking about being with you, John, that’s not, like, a synonym for selling myself short. Don’t insult me. I’m done settling for guys I’m not actually interested in. I’m here because I miss you, but…” With pained reluctance, she says, “If you don’t want to do this anymore, if you just want to be friends, I get it.” 

John feels a spark of panic. “No,” he responds. “Zari, that’s not what I meant. I want to be with you, I don’t want this to ruin us.” 

Zari massages her temple with one hand, and says, “I feel like we’re talking past each other.”

“Hard to figure out what to say,” John admits, because it is, even for two people who’ve made careers out of stringing the right words together at the right time. 

Zari gives John a small smile, aching hope in her eyes. “So let’s just be with each other again. If you’re okay with that. Or I can keep giving you space until...”

“No,” John responds. “I don’t want you to leave.”

(He wants to share space with something other than the memories, the shadows. With someone he trusts, even though it's dangerous to trust.

It doesn't feel as dangerous as having nothing, and it doesn't make his heart break in the same way either.)

The relief on Zari’s face makes John want to kiss her so he won’t have to see it, so he’ll be able to savor it. He doesn’t move.

“I want things to be normal again,” John murmurs, and Zari nods.

“Yeah,” she whispers. 

“Normal was actually good for once.”

“We’ll get through this.”

“You won’t tell anyone, right?” John asks, and Zari shakes her head.

“No.” She swallows and then says, in a small voice, “I kinda hope you will.” 

“Ah, you know what they say about hope,” John says, dismissing her before he can even consider why in the bleeding world he’d ever tell anyone else about this, and Zari’s odd shyness begins to fall away as she raises her eyebrows.

“Wait, what do they say about hope?”

“It’s stupid.”

A smile plays at her lips. “Oh, now you’re calling me stupid?”

John scoffs. “Don’t be like that, love,” he says, but he doesn’t mean it in the slightest.

For the time being, he feels almost like he used to.

In bed, with Zari’s head on his chest, John hopes that the sickening feelings he’s been having about this whole mess were temporary.

But you know what they say about hope.

\+ 

Zari sticks around. So does John, still too selfish to leave her behind, still trying to convince himself of what he’d barely managed to believe before this whole mess, that he and Zari are content and that’s good enough for now.

The issue is that he knows it’s not true anymore, with Zari waking him up from nightmares far more often than he does her even though she insists that it’s sleeping with him that helps her not have nightmares, so of course she’s going to have less nightmares when she’s with him than when he’s with her, _obviously_. 

But John knows this is hurting her, and the guilt makes it hard to think of anything else but how he causes pain by existing. He was doing so well with the whole “everyone around him getting hurt” thing. 

Everyone getting hurt and everyone leaving, giving up as they realized he wasn't worth having around. 

In the morning, he sinks into visions of everyone he cares about dead. He'd stopped having those years ago, something he hadn't even noticed until they started up again.

John’s grown and changed, though, so he counts his blessings, and he spins it.

John is good at spinning things, his own mental Loom of Fate. He’s good at weaving the facts into a story pretty enough to get him through the day, and in this case it’s easy. He just has to add a tag to those ugly fantasies:

_At least that’s not what happened._

+

Another late night, and John tells Zari, as his heart pounds and he holds her hands too tightly because she pulled them away from his face again and he let her, “At least it was me. At least no one got hurt. At least I didn’t hurt anyone else. At least it was just me, Zari. Right?”

Zari looks unhappy about it, but she says, “Okay, John. Okay.”

“I don’t want anyone to get hurt. There’s so many people here, I need to keep them from getting hurt,” he rambles with religious fervor, happy, in some way, to have found something soothing to believe for a second, and Zari releases his hands. He rests them on her knees, and rubs his thumbs over her smooth bare skin. She runs a hand over his hair. He quiets down and watches her, tilting his head. One more time, he whispers, “No one got hurt.” He gives her a twitchy smile. “See? I’m looking on the bright side. Glass half-full and all.”

Zari’s smile is strained, and she says, in the borderline-defeated voice of someone who’s starting to get used to saying placating things they don’t believe, “I know, John.” 

He leans his forehead against her shoulder, and she wraps her arms around him, and it’s funny, it’s so bleeding funny, how different this is to being touched from the back, how particular he’s become.

John returns the embrace, and wonders if Zari would choose him over the team if they found out. The thought just makes him more certain that they can never find out, because he doesn’t think she would and he couldn’t blame her and he doesn’t want to lose people anymore.

That’s selfish, but at this point John rests assured that he's a selfish kind of man.

+

There are days John spends in a daze, doing his best to keep from thinking about things he doesn’t want to think about. He’s not bad at it. He doesn’t even have to be drunk, though being drunk helps.

There’s one mission, then another, and John gets through them, does his best with Zari acting as a map for the sanest course of action, in spite of the crushing weight of what-ifs and his tendency, which had stopped being routine years ago but has returned with a vengeance, to go to a faraway place in his head and his body while still, allegedly, existing in the world. 

He and Zari are never placed together on missions when the team has to split up, because they used to have a habit of going off to shag. It was all very unprofessional, and John regrets it now, not that there’s anything that can be done about it.

It would make things easier, Zari tells him one night, if they didn’t have to worry about being split up, and as much as John would like to make things easier for her, he shakes his head. It’s not like they can tell Sara why their going off to shag isn’t a problem anymore. 

He leaves Zari’s room in a daze.

+

The others give John strange looks. They give both John and Zari strange looks, actually, and John can’t bring himself to ask Zari if anyone’s asked her what’s going on. They’ve asked him. More than one of them have, at least. 

_Is there something wrong?_

He tells Ava, “No.” because he knows she’ll get frustrated at the deadpan look and the short answer and the nasty tone and leave, _well-fine-if-you-want-to-be-that-way_.

He tells Sara, “Of course not.” and gives her a big smile because he knows she won’t believe him but will at least back off for the time being, _okay-I’ll-let-it-go-but-I’m-watching-you-no-not-like-that-you-jerk-you-know-exactly-what-I-mean._

He tells Nate, “What kind of a bloody question is that?” because he knows he’ll sigh and let John storm off, _yeah-nice-to-see-you-too-buddy_.

He tells Behrad, “Oh, bugger off, don’t you try playing little Mr. Fix-It with me.” because he knows Behrad will be distracted by the nickname he’s always hated with a passion, which is why John kept using it until he didn’t, _I’m-literally-like-four-inches-taller-than-you-come-on_.

So.

Is there something wrong? 

John hates the question. It feels like a riddle, only worse, because at least John’s good at riddles. He is not good at this. The answer is “no,” but then it twists and mutates in his head

There’s nothing wrong, not anymore. 

It’s over. 

John shouldn’t be acting like this. 

John’ll be back to normal soon. 

John has to go back to normal soon, because of Zari, because of his teammates, because he can’t be a burden anymore when he’s been one so often and for so long throughout his life. 

It’s hurting Zari to be the only one who knows, the only one who can help, so John can’t need help anymore. Shouldn’t have needed it in the first place. Didn’t need it in the first place.

Nothing happened, and it was all his fault.

The thoughts are rote, true as they are, and they settle into his mind, winding through it like ticker tape, constant and matter-of-fact.

John tells Zari she doesn’t have to worry about him. It embarrasses him anyway.

John freezes every time her hand brushes his belt. He ends up in medical too often having Gideon fix the scratches on his face before anyone sees, or, on the worst days, dragged there by Zari because he forgot he did it. Zari doesn’t wrap her arms around him from behind like she used to. He snaps at everyone and locks himself in his room with the shadows, thinking of what could stave them off and how he doesn't deserve it. He feels like he never wants to look at another human being again and like he always wants to know where they are, just to be sure.

John’s always been regrettably complicated.

Lately it’s more overwhelming than usual.

+

John remembers how, when he first met the Legends, they intrigued him and disgusted him in turns, and he slowly inched toward them. Learned how to be around them. Blatantly put them in danger and then started to care about them and then kept caring. Eventually, he learned how to be one. A real member of a team. A person with a genuinely settled life, or as settled as it can be, all things considered. He changed for the better, probably for the first time in his life.

The idea of re-learning how to _be here_ , how to interact with what’s come so close to becoming his home and the people who’ve actually become his friends, exhausts him.

He’s sure it would exhaust them too, if he ever said it: _I made a mistake, and I know that’s not a surprise but I made it and I can’t fix it because I already feel the madness coming on and I can’t risk making it worse and I don’t know how to exist anymore, not around you and not around myself, and I don’t know how to not know what to do because there’s so much more here than just me, I got too comfortable and now I’m too old to run._

It’s not true anyway, he insists to himself. It’s not true.

Fine, maybe it happened, maybe he didn’t just get knocked around, but it was thirty minutes at most, and he wasn’t even afraid, and all these ugly emotions are him being overdramatic.

He’s overdramatic. It’s a character flaw.

He’ll get better tomorrow, he tells himself every night, and these people he’s grown so painfully attached to will think he was just brooding for a bit, because he does that, and this life he’s so stupidly made for himself will fall back into its rhythm, and he’ll forget this ever happened, and die before his next big mistake.

+

As a wise goddess once said, _it’s better to bury those feelings than feel as awful as this_.

At this point, that bloody song might as well be his anthem, and he keeps humming it without thinking.

One night, Zari finally admits it’s driving her crazy, so he starts singing it out loud, and she groans and he smiles even though he knows, at the back of his mind, that, before all this, she would’ve playfully covered his mouth to make him stop.

But she doesn’t do that anymore.

+

John nearly lashes out one day when Mick comes at him from the back and he somehow doesn’t notice, and then he storms away to his room and tries to drink and spills the whiskey all over himself instead and ends up wheezing and heaving and begging himself to move on because he can’t take this anymore.

He tells himself to get over it like he’s gotten over everything else. 

(Sometimes he hears a child screaming, but he can never find them. Sometimes he feels like he’s bound. Most of the time he feels like he’s gagged. Most of the time he feels like there’s nothing to say that won’t tear everything to pieces. John tears things to pieces. John ruins things. He’s a curse unto himself, has been since the day he was born. He’s certainly a hell of a lot of work for very little reward. As far as he knows, this is the first time a Legend has gotten hurt like this while active, while on the job, and the failure is gutting.)

+

John sits near the others in the galley, reading with his feet on one of the tables, and reminds himself, as Ava physically shoves his legs off, making him scramble to not tip backwards in his chair (Zari stiffens; he does nothing but complain), that they are here now.

He could’ve called for back-up. He could’ve used all the tools at his disposal, but he didn’t even think of it because he’s an arrogant bastard.

That’s exactly why. 

+

He’s starting to give up on telling himself nothing actually happened. He thinks Natalie might’ve gotten that out of him.

So he spins.

+

It was his fault, really.

Hell, it was practically his choice.

+

Zari tells him things, when she thinks he’s asleep and he is, in fact, asleep enough to pretend he dreamt her words.

She tells him, “You’re not as good at hiding things as you think.”

She tells him, “I don’t know if we can keep this up forever.”

She tells him, “I still like sleeping with you.”

She tells him, “You’re so frustrating sometimes.”

She tells him, “I think you’re the first man I ever actually loved, which might have something to do with the fact that I’m too embarrassed to tell you that when you’re awake. Now that I think about it.”

She tells him, “You still make me happy.” 

She tells him, “You underestimate people way too much. I don’t actually think everyone else knowing would, like, ruin everything. I think it’d help.”

She tells him, “I’m sorry I couldn’t protect you.” 

+

The exhaustion mounts. 

Zari assures him that it hasn’t been long, which doesn’t make John feel any better, because if this is dragging so badly when it hasn’t been long, he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do as time goes on and it all keeps having happened.

Weeks pass, and John’s reality unravels until there’s nothing left but threads in his hands. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 4 - Debriefing  
> Summary: After a mission goes wrong, the other Legends find out. John and Sara have a conversation.


	4. Debriefing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a mission goes wrong, the other Legends find out. John and Sara have a conversation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, update schedule, officially: I'll be updating every Saturday.
> 
> (Also, thank you to everyone who has left feedback!)

“What was that, John?” Sara asks, and John rolls his eyes, slouching and taking a step back. “Hey, no, you’re not leaving. You’re debriefing right now, and you’re going to tell me: what the _hell_ was that?”

John grinds his teeth, clenching his fists in the pockets of his coat. He’s exhausted and the only thing he can think to do is stand here getting yelled at by one of his closest friends, who is currently fully in what Behrad aptly calls "Hard-ass Captain Mode."

John shrugs awkwardly and says, nonsensically, “Just doin’ my part.” He winces. 

There’s a long pause from Sara, and though John is avidly studying the ground, he can still see her blinking slowly at him in his mind’s eye before she says, “Okay, no, now is not the time to get sarcastic with me. What is going on with you? I gave you orders, John, and you are a part of this team, so I expect you to take them and not wild card on us. I thought you were over that.”

“I am over that,” John mutters, feeling a surge of annoyance. He messed up one bloody mission and suddenly he’s a loose cannon. 

“Then why did you decide to pull a disappearing act halfway through the mission instead of following the plan? And don't give me the 'tech goes dark when I do magic' bs, because we both know Ray fixed that. So why?”

It’s a bit of a trick question, though Sara doesn’t know it. 

John barely remembers what happened. At least not during the mission. He remembers someone coming in from behind. He remembers shoving his elbow into their stomach. He remembers realizing he was about to panic and dodging out of the way because of it, not wanting his teammates to see. Leaning against the wall of a narrow hallway, not knowing which way to go or where exactly he was. Muting his comm so no one could hear him even though they’d still be able to find him with the tracker.

Trying to scrape his nails down his face, but his hands were shaking and he just ended up wringing them out instead.

Taking deep breaths because he knew, he knew this wasn’t going to look good, but that room, those people, they were squeezing the air out of him and all he could think about was how much worse everything could get, surrounded by the enemy, so, of course, he went off alone even though that made no sense.

The rushing, crushing shame of realizing that he was acting insane at the worst possible moment, that his relatively balanced behavior on missions was never going to last forever. 

Zari in front of him with her hands on his shoulders, telling him to get it together, just get it together for ten minutes because they needed him. Looking into her eyes and seeing something bordering on desperation. “You’re on a mission, John, you’re on a mission and we just need one spell from you, you’re on a mission and it’s _not_ that one, look at me, I wasn’t...I wasn’t there when it happened, none of us were, and we weren’t _here_ when it happened, this is a totally different situation and you have to come back, everyone's just a call away and you have to come _back_."

Taking a deep breath, clenching his fists, and he could speak. “Right, yeah, I’m here, I’m here, I just need to, I just need to do this, I just need to do this.” 

The relief of pulling himself out of the fogginess before the demon could really drag him back and the stab of panic when he realized, again, that things were going wrong and it was his fault and he could bugger it up again and then where would he be? 

Zari nodding. “You just need to do this, John, come with me.”

So he went with her and, on autopilot, did what he had to do and he can’t remember what it was, but it wasn’t an exorcism and he was surrounded and he’d gotten himself together and see? See? He can do his job when he doesn’t even know what’s going on. Why couldn’t he then? Why didn’t he then?

“Answer me,” Sara demands, and John shrugs, his breath caught in his throat, still staring at the floor with humiliation rolling in his stomach. His eyes are burning and so are his cheeks. “That is not an answer,” Sara says. “You were also sloppy on the last two missions, and you were _literally_ drinking on the one before. I didn’t mention it because that one was solo and you got the job done, but this is obviously just getting worse. This isn’t going to become a pattern, do you understand that? When you’re putting the whole mission at risk, getting the job done isn’t enough.”

And doesn’t that stab John in the gut? 

Zari seems to understand that, because she sounds scandalized when she says, “Sara!” 

But Sara just says, “Zari, stand down.”

Because Sara has no bleeding idea. She has no idea how hard he’s been clinging to the thought that at least he got the job done. No idea how hard he tried to keep it together on those missions, no idea how hard he tried on this one either. 

Of course she doesn’t. Of course she doesn’t have any sympathy, and she wouldn’t if she knew the truth either. Probably she’d have even less, since it was so clearly his fault. He was even drinking. He was still sober when he got his “solo mission” and it’s not like he’s the only one who ever drinks while QBing, but that probably sounds better in his head than it would out loud, and _no, I wasn’t even under the influence when I got myself hurt_ sounds even worse. 

The truth is even worse.

 _This isn’t going to become a pattern._ It’s not like that’s what he wants. He’s not exactly a fan of being part of a team and feeling like he’s alone anyway, no matter how often he’s felt it before. He doesn’t want to go back to before and he doesn’t want to fall into something worse and he feels like he’s standing on a ledge and whichever way he moves it's going to hurt.

“I’m trying,” he grinds out, even though the words are inadequate, because he has to say something to defend himself. He glances up at Sara, finally looking her in the eye, and off the tough captain hat goes as the look on her face morphs into something else that John can’t name because he looks away almost immediately, afraid he’s shown her something he didn’t want her to see. 

“John,” Sara says firmly, though not unkindly, “I’m sorry, but if this is trying, then there is a legitimate issue here and I need to know what it is.” 

John nearly flinches, because she’s right. She’s right. He can’t keep on like this. He can’t be on the team like this. He shouldn’t be on the team at all, given what he let happen. Before he can say any of that, Zari says, “You know what? Stop, Sara.” She walks over to John and grips his upper arm. “Just stop. You’re—”

When she trails off, John shakes his head and lets out a huff of embarrassed laughter. There’s no explanation she can give either. 

“Okay, _what_ is going on?” Sara asks, exasperation and frustration plain in her voice. “What’s been going on? What do you know, Zari? This is clearly something relevant to the team.” 

And at that, John finally snaps. 

He sets his jaw and looks Sara in the eye and, letting all the viciousness of saying something no one wants to hear bleed into his voice, tells the truth. “What’s going on is three missions ago, you sent me on a solo mission to do an exorcism on a possessed escaped convict, and I screwed it up and, ah, not for the better.” 

He swallows. “Should’ve been easy, even got the bloody name right off, and instead I got—stunned. Took a hit to the head. Got overpowered.” He shrugs. “Let the demon do what he wanted for a bit, had to play unconscious to finish the job, and…” He makes a kind of helpless waving motion with one of his hands. “Guess he wasn’t getting what he wanted in Hell, eh? Or maybe he wanted to take his suit for a spin, or maybe…” 

John takes in a shaky breath when the thought hits him, as thoughts horrible enough that he somehow hadn’t thought them until the worst possible moment often do, and says, “Or maybe he just wanted to gloat about bleeding...ha! _Sodomizing_ John Constantine.” John snorts. “I’m sure he and his mates’ll all have a good laugh about that. Never hear the end of it, with how rumors spread down there.” He shrugs and wraps his arms around himself. “But he earned it, didn’t he? Got me good. Yeah. Got me good.”

As he talks, voice bitter and ragged, he gets vague impressions of his teammates, because they’ve all been here from the beginning, bearing awkward witness to Sara chewing him out, and now they’re bearing witness to this awful rambling monologue. He wants to scream, but he doesn't. He speaks. He can speak, and apparently the only things that can come out are things he doesn't want to say. 

He speaks in spite of Zari’s increasingly bruising grip on his arm, speaks through an unhappy grunt from Mick, through Nate saying, “oh, fuck,” through Ava putting her head in her hands and Behrad murmuring something John pretends he can’t make out because he doesn’t know what to do with “come on, that’s not fair.” 

John speaks through it, lays out the whole sorry situation for them all. For Sara, who’s standing there with her arms crossed and an expression of exhausted regret and sympathy on her face that John can swear holds a hint of disappointment. 

After he stops talking, a suffocating silence falls until Sara, bound to her job, breaks it. 

“John,” she starts, but he’s done. He raises his hands and shakes his head. He doesn’t know why he said anything. He feels like he’s going to be sick. 

“I can’t do this anymore,” he mutters, and he tears his arm from Zari’s grip and leaves for his room. 

If anyone says anything as he goes, he ignores it.

+

Roughly an hour ago, John blew up his life, and now he is drunk, though it’s not a bad kind of drunk. On a scale of “not actually drunk but still getting attacked by a petty demon” to “waking up in hospital,” he’d say he’s at “sloshed enough to avoid dealing with the intricacies of his messy emotions.” He stares up at the ceiling.

Zari hasn’t come after him, which is a relief. He doesn’t think he can handle the conversation they may or may not have to have about this mess he’s gotten himself into right now. This mess he’s gotten them into. 

He’s attached to too many people these days, that’s the problem. Attached enough that his nonsense put the team he’s somehow found himself on in jeopardy, he reminds himself, taking another swig from his bottle of whiskey. And here he thought he’d learned how to play nice by now. 

Here he _had_ learned to play nice by now, but then…

Well, it’s over. His teammates know. The magic's gone and it's just John Constantine, failure.

Yet again, he considers where to go once he can’t stay here. His house, still out of the question. New York apartment, also out of the question. Maybe he can just run off. He’s good at that. Find somewhere to shack up like he did when he was younger. Someone to shack up with. Sure, go ahead and cheat on Zari for real this time. Maybe drop her a note before heading out. _I.O.U. some seven months of your life back._ Maybe he’ll add a regretful emoticon, the one with the little slash for a mouth. 

Yes, he shall leave all the Legends behind, no address and certainly no phone number, nothing for them if they need him. They wouldn’t need him anyway, not now that he’s nothing but a hindrance. Gary? Better off without him. He could probably do an exorcism solo at this point. Probably do it better than John. Astra? She’ll be thrilled to never have to see his face again. 

He’ll just disappear and no one will ever find him, and that’ll be in everyone’s best interest.

The thoughts feel more and more adolescent and ridiculous with every moment he dwells on them, especially once he realizes that he’s in the temporal zone and he’d have to get off the damn ship to pull a real disappearing act, and getting his hands on the jumpship or a time courier without anyone noticing isn't going to happen without the kind of magic that he doesn’t have the energy for right now. 

Salting and burning everything he’s made over the past couple of years he’s been with the Legends is effectively impossible unless he dies, and that’s not appetizing. 

So here John is, between a rock and a hard place. 

He takes another pull of the bottle. At least being drunk takes some of the sting out. Too bad he can’t just stay drunk forever. 

(Or…?)

Someone knocks on his door.

(No, probably not.)

“Not now, love,” John calls, assuming the knock on the door is Zari. “Bit busy.”

“Doing what?” Sara asks, and John raises his eyebrows in surprise, though he doesn’t know why. Sara, after Zari, is the most likely to come and talk to him after all that. Maybe she’ll kick him off the ship and he won’t even have to scheme about how to avoid the awkward situations that are sure to hound him for the rest of his miserable life after the stunt he just pulled. 

“Doin’ anything but talking to you, Lancie,” John says.

“John, I’m—”

“If you apologize, I am never going to open this door. You will find my corpse in two weeks’ time.”

“Has anyone told you that you are an absolute drama queen?” Sara asks, and John has been told that multiple times, though all when he was much younger than he is now. “Fine. How about you just let me in?”

“Not a chance,” John responds, and then the door opens. 

He forgot to lock it. Lovely. The one person on the ship who can lock doors with magic, and he forgot, in spite of his threats. He’s losing his touch. 

“Good one, John-o,” he mutters to himself, and he gives Sara a sideways look. “Oh, yeah, don’t worry, you’re definitely welcome here, I don’t want you to sod off or anything, make yourself at home, let’s have a chat.”

Sara ignores his rambling, and, instead, with a little hesitation, admits, “This explains a lot.”

John snorts. “Does it?”

“I’m guessing you weren’t trying to play wild card on the mission,” Sara says, and John, drunk enough to be somewhat numb to how much he doesn’t want to have this conversation, since it’s happening anyway, sits up with some effort and actually looks right at Sara.

She's leaning against his doorway, arms crossed, giving him a look that John can only describe as rueful, and John gestures at her with his near-empty bottle of whiskey. “Right you are, love. Just got mixed up, is all.”

There’s a long silence, and then Sara says, “You didn’t call for back-up.”

John figures she’s not talking about the last couple of missions anymore.

John finishes off the bottle of whiskey and lets it fall to the floor. It doesn’t break, but it cracks. 

“I could do it on my own.”

Sara’s silence makes him suspect that she’s wondering whether it would be too harsh to say he clearly couldn’t.

“Well, it’s not like you were expecting me to need help, were you?” 

Sara stays silent, and John knows what he’s saying is true.

( _I almost called,_ he thinks. _Would’ve made it easier, and I like the easy route._ _Thought, well, if someone bursts in, this idiot—he’ll get distracted, he’ll let me go, I’ll get the job done and we’ll all have a laugh._

_But I didn’t call. Didn’t even call Gary._

_I didn’t call because I didn’t need it, I didn’t want it, I decided not to because I was arrogant, I didn’t call because I didn’t have—)_

“Exorcisms have been my job long before I set foot on this ship,” John says. “This time just…” He lets out a bitter laugh. “I’m not supposed to be happy, am I?”

“No, that’s not fair, John. It was bad luck.”

“Don’t make sense. One of the few times in my life things are going just fine and I end up stunned and...attacked on a simple exorcism? No, that’s not bad luck, it’s the universe reminding me I _am_ bad luck. I shouldn’t be here. You don’t think I should be here, d’you?”

Sara looks inexplicably taken aback. “Woah, no, that’s not even kind of what I was gonna say.”

Mostly ignoring her, John presses on. 

“A possession came up on some mission, and I’m sure you thought, well, that’s a bit much, but at least I’ve got Constantine, he’ll deal with it and I’ll never have to think of it again.” Sara nods in reluctant concession, and, satisfied, he continues. “Now look at where you are. The one thing I am always supposed to be good for, _Captain Lance,_ and it went completely wrong, and it’s just gotten worse from there.”

“You sent the demon back to Hell, though, right?”

“Course I did. If that had happened and I hadn’t, you’d be using Gary for any magic needed ‘cause you’d never have seen me again and he’d be about as good a sorcerer as I’d be anyhow.”

“So you still did your job,” Sara says. The words are almost reluctant. 

“Oh, but sometimes getting the job done isn’t enough.”

Sara lets out a long sigh and rubs her forehead. “That was...the wrongest possible thing I could’ve said, wasn’t it?”

“Very well might’ve been, love. But it’s not like you knew. And before you ask me why I didn’t tell you, think about it for a second. If—all right, if what happened to me had happened to you while the aliens had you, would you have told us?”

Sara almost flinches at that, obviously caught off-guard, and John feels a spark of panic, an itching fear that he’s missed something important. He remembers being at Sara’s side in medical after she got back and his relief at her admission that she was kind of really high on whatever it was the aliens gave her for most of the abduction. He sat with her through sleepless nights and had idle conversations and joked about nightmares and in the end she really seemed to be all right—resilient, she is—but Sara can lie too. Sara can leave details out too.

This ship is full of liars, and it’s screaming with all the things that they’re not saying.

The world is full of people he couldn’t protect and can’t protect, still. The universe is crawling with evil, horrible things that have happened and might happen and could’ve happened and will happen that he doesn’t know about yet.

“Wait, Sara, _did_ that happen to you while the aliens had you?”

“No,” Sara says firmly, as if putting an incorrect theory to rest. “It did not.”

The words are sincere, as far as John can tell, and he has no choice but to believe her. 

John’s heart is still beating too hard, but the panic subsides. 

Sara shakes her head as though she’s shaking off whatever it is she feels about what John just threw at her, and says, “I get what you’re saying, and I wasn’t actually going to ask you why you didn’t tell right away.” She clenches and unclenches her jaw. “But this happened on my watch.”

John lets out a bark of laughter in response, not interested in whatever Sara’s about to say. “Oh, bollocks. Don’t say that. It happened on my watch and you know it. Go feel guilty about things that are actually your fault, will you? I know there’s plenty to choose from.” He sneers that last bit, hoping the low blow will make Sara lose her patience and get out of here so he can continue lying in bed engaging in drunken contemplation. 

He should have predicted it wouldn’t work, but he’s still disappointed when all Sara does is give him an exasperated look. She pushes away from his door frame so that she’s standing up straight, feet planted on the floor and arms still crossed, and she pins him with an even, not unsympathetic look. Oh, she’s going full Captain Lance, that’s fun, that’s exactly what John wanted.

“Fine. Let’s get back to the basics. You’re still on the team, John,” Sara says. “We’re still going to deal with this.”

“No thanks,” John mutters.

Unamused, Sara says, “Let me clarify. You’re still on the team, and this is clearly affecting things, so we _have_ to deal with this.”

“I’m drunk,” John points out, and Sara rolls her eyes.

“Okay, fair. But once you’re sober, we’ll figure out how to get you back into fighting shape.”

“I really was trying,” John says glumly, and Sara, apparently done standing in his doorway, walks over and sits on the side of his bed. He gets to a fully seated position, crossing his legs on the bed like he’s going to meditate, and wonders why he decided to continue this conversation when he’s been longing for an end to it this whole time. “But I just…” John makes a vague motion at his head. “Lost the plot this time. Only managed because Zari found me and reminded me I had a job to do.”

“So having someone who knew what was going on helped,” Sara says, and John shrugs.

“Someone. Zari.”

“Maybe we’ll make sure to pair you up if you’re in the field.” _If_ you’re in the field. Yeah, John imagines he’ll be QBing for a while unless they really need to pull in the madman in the attic. “We stopped putting you and Zari together when we split up because you kept going off to have sex,” Sara admits, and John snorts.

“Yeah, we’re not idiots, love, we know.” John swallows and mutters, "But you don't have to worry about that right now.”

Sara raises an eyebrow at him, and he shrugs. “Haven’t been able to have sex since it happened, love, and trust me, I’ve tried.” He grimaces. “How d’you think Zari found out?”

“Oof,” Sara offers in response, and John almost smiles. 

“Yep. Bloody humiliating, all of it.”

“Can’t help but notice you and Zari aren’t broken up, though,” Sara says, and John tenses.

“And what do you mean by that?”

“...I mean literally exactly what I said.”

“Look, if you want to talk to Zari about her bad decisions, I ain’t stopping you.”

“What bad decisions? I was just pointing out that Zari clearly still cares about you. We all still care about you.”

“Ah, so we’re onto the sharing and caring portion of the night, are we?” John asks, giving Sara a flat look.

Her stance is much more relaxed at this point. Less his captain, more his friend. 

“You _are_ drunk,” Sara says. “Don’t tell me that’s not the best possible time to share and care.”

John isn’t sure if he’s gonna give her that one, but he doesn’t say anything.

They sit in silence for a moment before John finally breaks it for some sodding reason, even though he should’ve just left it alone until Sara got the hint and fucked off. 

“This should never have happened,” he murmurs, and Sara gives him a sad smile.

“Sometimes things just suck, Constantine,” she says, and he snorts.

“Yeah, we’d know, wouldn’t we?”

“We would. But we can help you now.”

“Right, because healing is just a quirky mission away, yeah?”

Sara cracks a smile at that. “It was for me.” She pauses, cocking her head. “Okay, maybe more than a few quirky missions. And a lot of friends.”

Childish as it is, John makes a theatrical gagging noise, and Sara gives him a shameless shrug. 

“You know that talk don’t work on me, love,” he says, even though he’s still here letting her talk. Caring about her opinion as a captain and, more than that, as a friend. The thought makes his mood darken, and he says, “I was better off, Sara.”

Sara’s smile fades. “Look, not to downplay what happened, but compared to the guy I recruited to the Legends, you are better off. I’m not actually saying that it’s going to be easy or that I know exactly what you’re going through or that anyone does, but I don’t think any of us are strangers to getting hurt, or…violated.” Sara swallows. “I’m definitely not.”

John sighs. He doesn’t believe all that, but some of it, at least, is true, and he settles for it.

“I know," he murmurs. "But what a time for it to happen, eh?”

“Can’t argue with that.”

“Sometimes things just suck,” John mutters, and Sara nods. 

“Yeah, but you’ve got us. That’s good for something, right?”

The Legends of Tomorrow. What a bunch of idiots.

“Personally, I think you’re all wasting your time,” John says, stiffening. “I should go, save you lot the trouble.”

“You’re just saying that,” Sara points out, and John can’t actually argue, considering the entire debate he had with himself before not leaving the ship. She continues, and he lets her. “Not everything has to fall apart, John. You don’t have to make everything fall apart. You deserve to be happy, so keep going, okay? We’ll go with you.”

“Ugh,” John says in response, because otherwise a lump might rise in his throat. “Disgusting. Really, what happened to you?”

Sara smiles. “I became a Legend.”

“Also disgusting," John deems, and then he and Sara are quiet for a long moment before he, still slightly buoyed by whiskey, asks, "And if things get worse?”

“Oh, come on, Johnny, you know we stick together especially if things get worse. We’re all about damage control here.” Sara’s jovial tone changes, then, and she says, “Seriously. Even if it turns out that it’ll take a while to get you back into fighting shape, it’s not gonna change that you’re a Legend, and it’s not going to change that you’re part—”

John cuts her off there, because she’s about to say “of this family” and he refuses to process that. “All right, all right, I get the picture,” he says, and then he decides he’s really done with this whole thing, unfolds, and flops onto his back.

“Okay, I guess that’s my cue to leave,” Sara says, and John scoffs.

“You’ve had several.” 

Sara laughs. There's a strain in her voice, and John knows, for a moment, that something between them has changed. “Go to sleep, John.” 

At some point, he actually does. He only knows that because he wakes up. His shoes are off, which he doesn’t think they were when he closed his eyes. His head is pounding. The night before comes rushing back, and John covers his face and groans.

His life hasn't been ruined, but a small part of him wishes it had been, because he's not sure how much more humiliation he can take. Would be easier to be ostracized. Instead he has to worry about how his teammates who _care_ are going to look at him when he goes to breakfast.

So John skips breakfast. 

And lunch.

And dinner.

In fact, he skips leaving his room entirely, because he doesn’t really want to know what comes after that debrief and that conversation with Sara, so he holds out hope that he can just stay in his now properly locked room forever. And gets progressively more dehydrated. 

A while into his brave attempt at hermithood, there’s a knock on the door. The knocker is Zari this time, as it turns out, and through the door she calls, “Hey, John, open up.” 

John, who’s been pretty much passed out with his eyes open, falls back to himself and groans. He can almost see Zari roll her eyes as she says, “It’s literally me, why aren’t you opening the door for me?”

John sighs. She has a point. Zari’s known for a while now, and she’s been the one person he can almost confide in, and at some point soon he’s going to want her here and he doesn’t feel like explaining the specifics of why he doesn’t right now. (“I just don’t” generally doesn’t fly, and he'd rather walk out the airlock than try and explain all the things he's feeling that he doesn't even bleeding understand.)

He unlocks the door and drags himself over to open it and usher her in. 

She’s in full make-up and new clothes that she probably had Gideon replicate very recently, and John asks, “Been doing videos, then?” 

“I’ve been doing videos this whole time, John. I spent yesterday editing and went to a meeting today. The travelogue is a major success. Z Nation is starved for content, but what I give them keeps them coming back,” Zari says, smirking.

“Good on you,” John says half-hearted but not sarcastic. “Glad you’re still on schedule.”

“I’m always on schedule.” Zari’s smirk fades, and she says, “So you seriously haven’t left this creepy hole for as long as I’ve been gone? We have one bathroom. What have you been doing?”

“Don’t remind me,” John mutters, because, lack of food and water or not, his body keeps being a human body, and nature is starting to call. “And my room’s no creepy hole.” Though he can see how people may get that impression. 

“Sure,” Zari responds, voice rich with sarcasm. “Of course.” She swallows and says, a little quieter, “You’ll come to mine tonight, right?” 

John grimaces. 

“Seriously, there’s literally no way you’ll be able to stay in here forever,” Zari says, an edge of annoyance in her voice. John doubts she’s gotten any sleep, with how focused it seems like she’s been on her work, and lack of rest shortens her temper. “You’re gonna have to, like, deal with it eventually.”

John groans. “I’d really rather not, love.”

“Yes, yes, because avoidance is the John Constantine way,” Zari says with a little bitterness. “Who do you think fielded the questions from everyone else after you left?”

John feels a surge of discomfort, and he looks at Zari, who, for her part, looks like she immediately regretted having said that. “What’d you tell them?” he asks.

Zari sighs, leaning carefully against his desk. “Just, like...stuff that had to do with me too. Did I know? Yes. Why didn’t I tell? Uh, because you didn’t want me to. Is this why you’ve been so weird? Literally duh. Why didn’t I tell once it was affecting the team? No offense, but the team wasn’t exactly my first concern. That’s basically it. Then I told them I was going to work and they’d be sorry if they bothered me.” She swallows and tucks her hair behind her ear, glancing away. “I had a lot to do anyway.” 

“Ah,” John responds. “Guess that’s not so bad. After I already told ‘em everything anyway, like a bloody idiot.”

“I don’t think you were an idiot,” Zari says. “I think you did the right thing. I mean. They care.”

John sighs, running a hand over his face. “So I’ve been told. Wish they wouldn’t. If they want to talk...I already talked to Sara, love, I’m all talked out.” He is, too, he really is. 

Zari lets out a frustrated huff, and then says, “Okay, well, I’ll be out there once you decide to stop playing shut-in.” 

“See you never, then,” John mutters in response.

“One bathroom,” Zari sing-songs as she leaves, “so actually I’ll see you in like...an hour?”

It’s two hours before John has to concede defeat and venture out to the bathroom, but he doesn’t run into anyone on the way there, so he’s calling it a clear win. 

As he washes his hands, he notices the ache in his stomach, and wonders if he might have enough luck to be able to go to the galley to get some food and then back to his room without running into anyone. 

It’s an empty hope, given John’s terrible luck and the several other very social people who live on this ship—a fact that keeps swinging between comforting and terrifying—so almost the first thing that happens after he leaves the bathroom and then makes the mistake of dawdling in the hallway for a few seconds, longing for something, anything, to put in his stomach, is that someone places a hand on his shoulder. 

John, apparently suffering from a terminal case of jumpiness, comes very close to flinching out of his skin, and Ava quickly removes her hand from his shoulder as he pivots on his heel to look at her, an incantation on his lips. Just in case. Doesn’t want to get caught off-guard again. 

“Sorry!” she says, holding her hands up. “I should’ve, uh, guessed not to do that.”

John bristles. “Oh, why?”

Ava looks a bit caught out, and John imagines she’s wondering if she should answer his question. 

She shouldn’t, so he doesn’t wait around. If he’s already been accosted by a teammate, he might as well go to the bloody galley and get some food. And replicate several bottles of whiskey. 

He pushes past Ava, making a point of knocking into her. 

To his complete lack of surprise, Ava tags along behind him, and he ignores her—and Nate, and Behrad, who are both also in the galley—while he asks Gideon to replicate him some eggs and toast. He could make it himself, but he’s got no energy and the joys of technology at his fingertips, and he uses all the tools at his disposal, doesn’t he?

He can feel eyes on his back, and he knows it’s just his teammates, but the thought that he’s got his back to danger eats at him more than usual, and he mutters at Gideon to replicate him an Irish coffee too, hoping it’ll slow his heart down and numb the itching. 

He’s quick to turn around anyway, and he tosses the plate on the counter, not breaking it only by a miracle, and then plops the mug down next to it, watching the others out of the corner of his eye as they watch him out of the corners of their eyes. 

He chugs the Irish coffee.

It’s going to be a long day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 5 - Action!  
> Summary: In an attempt to rehabilitate his image, John goes to a movie night. It goes shockingly wrong. No, seriously, it is shocking how wrong it goes.


	5. Action!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In an attempt to rehabilitate his image, John goes to a movie night. It goes shockingly wrong. No, seriously, it is shocking how wrong it goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heads-up that this chapter is really heavy on flashbacks (to the point where it's one of the more descriptive ones re the rape), self-blame, and paranoia. It's also probably the most intense this story gets self-harm-wise. 
> 
> And thank you so much to everyone who’s left feedback! I really appreciate it and please do drop a comment if you have the time and are so inclined; they make my day.

John flops down on Zari’s bed and stares at the ceiling.

“This is killing me,” he says grimly, and Zari lies down next to him, raising her eyebrows. She looks a bit sad, and he rolls his eyes. “I mean the others acting like they’re acting, love.”

(The dubious looks, the conspicuous way they go quiet when he enters a room, the stilted way they talk to him, the overwhelming hesitance, the plain _concern_. It’s been three days, and John’s already lost his patience with the thought of this kid gloves treatment going on much longer.)

The sadness on Zari’s face turns to relief, and she gives him something of a smirk. “Sara’s been okay. So has Mick, I guess.”

John doesn’t mention that Sara’s been more “aggressively cheery” bordering on pushy than “okay,” and instead points out that, “Mick hasn’t so much as looked at me in three days, so that probably makes it easier.” 

There’s a spark of annoyance in Zari’s eyes at the words, and John says, “Don’t. I’d rather he not talk to me, if that’s how he feels about it.” He sighs. “I wish they’d just act normal.”

At that, Zari sits up, and John follows her lead. 

She sounds genuinely exasperated when she says, “John, you’re not really making it easy.” She grimaces. “I mean. I don’t want to, like, blame you for anything, they _are_ acting weird, it’s kind of...like, it’s complicated, things were weird with...they were weird between _us_ at first, I don’t really…”

John waves away her rambling, not interested in paying attention to all of that and very interested in figuring out how he’s fucking things up so that maybe he can, for once, fix it. “How do you mean I’m not making it easy?”

Zari sighs, defeated, and says, “Fine, I _mean,_ if everything’s normal and everyone should just forget about this because you’re super okay,” and John doesn’t appreciate the almost bitter sarcasm dripping from those words, so he pretends there isn’t any, “then...I guess you should show them that? Dropping off the face of the earth after an incident isn’t _always_ the way to go when you’ve got the chance for a calculated comeback.”

And it clicks. It looks bad if John’s in his room most of the time because it looks like he’s avoiding everyone for some reason related to what happened instead of just because they’re blowing this whole thing out of proportion. _Ergo,_ he’s going to have to take it upon himself to show them that they’ve got it all wrong.

John says, like a revelation, “I have to rehabilitate my image.”

Zari furrows her brow, taken aback. “Do you actually listen to me when I talk about work?” she asks.

“Occasionally.”

Zari snorts and says, “That’s not really what I mean, but...if you think of it like that, does that mean you’ll come down and eat lunch? At a table in the galley? Even if we run into other human beings?” 

John would honestly rather eat rat poison, but if an awkward meal is what he needs to fix what he whole-heartedly believes is a misunderstanding, he’ll do it. “Yes.”

“Then let’s rehabilitate your image,” Zari says, standing up. 

She holds out a hand. John takes it.

+

They are obviously not the only people who had the idea to go to the galley and eat lunch at lunchtime, and the conversation conspicuously stops when John comes in, as he expected. There’s a mild breath of relief when Zari follows, he thinks, and John rolls his eyes. 

“Nice to see you too,” he mutters. “Been resting.”

“That’s good,” Behrad offers. “Seems like. A good thing to do.”

John sighs and asks Gideon for a sandwich or something, he doesn’t care. 

He feels a sharp pang of discomfort when he sees Zari jerk her head over to the table where Behrad, Ava, and Nate are sitting, even though he knows she’s just being supportive. Either that or challenging him. Well, John’s not the kind of person to back down from a challenge. He clenches his jaw and tells himself to stop. There’s no reason to be nervous. Nothing has changed. He’s been around them before, over the past few weeks. 

He sits down at the table and picks at his sandwich. Behrad loudly says something about a movie he just watched, and Ava and Nate join in on the conversation with too much enthusiasm. 

John’s arm hurts like there’s something at his side that’s too hot to touch, something dangerous, and it makes his chest constrict. There’s nothing at his side but Nate, which doesn’t offer an explanation for why John’s starting to feel nauseous. They’re almost close enough to touch. Maybe it’s Nate’s bulk right next to him making it difficult to tell who he is, John starts to think, and then he kicks away the thought. Can’t be. It would mean he’s nervous around Nate, of all people, _because,_ and there’s no _because_ here _._ Definitely no _because it happened._

John tries to be subtle when he pushes his plate over to the other side of the table, where there’s an empty seat that’s not right next to anyone and definitely isn’t right next to Nate, which would actually make it possible to face everyone and remind himself that there’s nothing to be—

John stands up to make the thought drop away, and everyone goes silent. He walks over to the other side of the table, sits, and takes an almost aggressive bite of his sandwich. He was not subtle, and now everyone is giving him strange looks. At least his arm doesn’t hurt anymore. Better view here. 

Through his too-big mouthful, he gestures at Behrad and says, “G’wed.” 

More incoherent than before and even though there’s clearly nothing left to say, Behrad launches back into whatever it was he was talking about, and John keeps an eye on the others. 

Zari finally gets to the table and sits down in the seat John vacated, giving him a slightly suspicious look. She pushes a glass of green juice over at him, and he gives her a deadpan look. “Really?”

“It’s nutritious.”

“It’s horrible,” John says, and then he drinks it.

Zari makes a face. “You’re not supposed to chug it.”

There’s a beat, and Behrad says, “Quick question, how do you even drink that?”

John shrugs. 

“I mean...he did drink like a full cup of Rasputin one time,” Ava says, and John raises his eyebrows. Is that _banter_ he detects? 

“Wait, you _drank_ part of Rasputin?” Nate asks, and John grins at him for a second. 

“And then I went to Hell.”

“Oh, of course you did,” Zari says, and Ava and Behrad laugh.

There’s still a tinge of awkwardness in the room, but John can breathe a little easier. For a moment, he feels normal. 

The conversation settles after that, though John doesn’t participate, focused on his food, until, a few minutes later, Ava says, “So, uh, it’s movie night.”

There’s a long pause. John looks up at her. “You talking to me?”

“Yeah, I just...you used to go. To movie night. I thought maybe.” Ava swallows. 

“Don’t hurt yourself,” John mutters, but, in spite of the mounting anxiety coming from Ava, who is incapable of functioning if she doesn’t feel like she’s doing everything right, he says, “I’ll be there.” He did used to go. He’s always had a fondness for movie nights, because...he doesn’t know, actually. Maybe it was just comfortable. Maybe it was just happening and John likes being where things are happening. Maybe it’s more complicated than that, but not in a way John has to think about. 

Maybe he wants that comfortable feeling back, because he doesn’t know when he lost it and he knows exactly when he lost it, but he’s going to go to movie night and everything is going to be fine. No reason to be bloody nervous around the others when lately he’s been more likely to be nervous when he’s not around them.

(Not like anything’s changed, except he used to go to movie nights and hasn’t for weeks.

Except they know, but that doesn’t matter. Does that have to matter?) 

“Really?” Behrad blurts out, and John scoffs.

“Yes, really, why is it such a surprise?” he snaps, standing up. “What, d’you think I’m going to have some kind of nervous breakdown at a bleeding movie night? Give me a little credit.”

He tries not to storm out of the galley, and probably fails. 

After a few hours of stewing, Gideon tells him that everyone’s gathered for movie night, if he’s still interested, and John doesn’t even know why she’s the one telling him, but he’s going. 

+

John is in the parlour, surrounded by the others, who are lounging and also exuding awkward cheeriness. It feels like they’re trying to get used to something, and he isn’t keen on the idea that it’s him. 

John wishes he had a deck of cards, just to be able to do something with his hands and have that old comfort. When he was young, his favorite things in the world were decks of cards, a good tool to use to fantasize about magic, to pretend. 

John’s always liked magic, even before he realized it actually existed. He liked illusions best, the way they made people _ooh_ and _ah,_ the secrets behind them so much more pleasant than all the other secrets he had to lock away. He got good at magic tricks without even really trying, picked things up without missing a beat, and he liked that too. The control. He could control other people’s minds, even, or at least what they saw. He could make people think he was better than he really was, more powerful. 

Just by himself, John was a little thing, bruised and underfed, moody and perennially behind in class. But with magic, even fake magic, he was good at something. He was confident, impressive, the kind of person people looked at with something more than pity or disgust, and as he grew up, so did the magic, and the power he felt he had as a child making things disappear into thin air became real. 

When he was young, John got magic on his side, and even as it became destructive, even when it ruined him, it was still there, the one thing he always had, whether he wanted it or not. 

(He had magic on his side, and he couldn’t escape it, and he called it power.

He shoves the thought away.

That’s not how the story goes.) 

John sits down on one of the armchairs, posture purposefully relaxed. He has a book with him. He chose it at random, but it’s because he usually brings a book to movie nights (everyone assumes he isn’t one for movies, which isn’t true, but he’s not one for their movies), never mind that his mind seems to do nothing but wander as of late. 

He’s felt fine, in his room or in Zari’s room. No reason he shouldn’t feel fine now. 

There’s no one here but his teammates. Everyone is safe. He is safe.

He just needed some rest, is all. He’s all right now. Just needed some rest. 

John’s fingers brush against his lips. 

He can feel eyes on him, darting back and forth as his teammates engage in overly-cheerful conversation. They’re trying to be normal too. John wonders if Zari spoke to them. 

Well. Let them stare. Let them see he’s here, and all is well.

( _Is there something wrong?_

They’d already noticed, and now they think they understand _why,_ but there is no _why._ There can’t be.

Sara said, _This explains a lot._ )

John turns the page of the book he hasn’t been reading, and a large hand falls on his shoulder and squeezes.

People put their hands on his shoulders here all the time. It’s normal. It’s casual. It’s good, it’s good that someone is being normal and casual. 

He flinches. 

Well, “flinch” may be underselling it, because it’s more like a convulsion, not just a shock of surprise but a full electrocution by panic, and there’s someone behind him with the kind of hand that could cover his whole face, probably, and the room is dim and John doesn’t think he’s in the laundry room but isn’t sure where he is.

He’s not wearing his coat. Someone took his coat off. He doesn’t know why he’s still so hot, then, because he’s burning up.

John tugs at his tie, which is a noose around his neck. Sorry, _loose_ around his neck. It’s loose now, but tighten it and his airflow could get cut off. He doesn’t know why he still wears the thing. Someone’s going to grab him by it someday. People have grabbed him by it. Why does he wear it again? It’s a fashion statement, maybe. He’s used to it, maybe. What’s he doing making fashion statements? What’s he doing getting used to things? 

His fingers stay clamped around his tie, and he feels it cut against the back of his neck, the threads straining, and that’s right, the tie’s cheap enough, his ties are cheap enough that it’d break before anyone could do much with it but bruise him, tear like it’s nothing. His clothes tear pretty easily, except the coat. 

No one noticed that he didn’t have his tie anymore, when he got back from his mission, or that the buttons of his shirt were almost all missing, or that there was blood on the seat of his trousers, but black trousers and a long coat hide a multitude of sins and John’s good at hiding multitudes of sins and so was good at hiding how he’d picked his coat up off the floor and shrugged it back on with difficulty after putting on the rest of his filthy clothes, and it was a little torn but he knew he could fix it, a little dirty but he knew he could wash it, except the coat, one of four he’s got, is crumpled under his bed with the rest of the ruined clothes he was wearing. 

There was blood in his hair. Ava noticed. John brings his hand up to his head. No blood. It’s not too late.

Someone touched him from behind already, so he’s on the edge of being trapped. 

He’s surrounded but it doesn’t make sense because it’s past the time when he can call for help because he’s not wearing his coat anymore and his comm’s in the pocket. His coat was still on when he slammed into the wall and his ears were ringing and he laughed at himself— _stupid sod, what are you doing? Have you lost your touch? Just a few months with a team (or has it been a couple years now?) and one apprentice looking over your shoulder and you’re losing your touch. You didn’t even see that coming when you know how they struggle. Why are you dizzy? You can’t already be out of breath, your ribs are fine, you haven’t hit your head if your skull ain’t caved in chin up Johnny chin up you’re better than this old son be better than this—_ and he went to pick up his cross and it turned out that he still had his back to danger and.

He was wearing his coat.

If he’d put his hand in his pocket, he could’ve grabbed his comm and turned it on, because he’s not stupid, he knows there’s still a tracker in it and if he’d turned it on someone, probably Behrad on the ship, would’ve noticed that the tracker had blinked on, John’s seen what it looks like on the map, and they would’ve known he was sending his own personal S.O.S. 

But he’s not wearing his coat anymore and there’s a hand on his shoulder and it’s already too late and this wasn’t the plan, this was not the bloody plan and he needs to get back to it, needs to get with it or he’ll be on the floor and he’ll hit his head again. 

He’s probably already hit his head again, if he can’t remember where his coat went, if he can’t seem to remember why he wanted it so much in the first place other than it’s where he puts most of his extra equipment, though there are some bits and bobs in his trousers, but when John manages to think anything at all in the few seconds he has left, he has to notice that this isn’t quite the same, is it? He’s not there.

He’s somewhere else and he’s in danger but come on, John can break out of this grip— _stupid sod, what are you doing? You weak thing you lost your touch why are you like this you freak you mistake you arrogant bastard do you get off on ruining things is that it? In the end no one’s ever felt anything but regret for loving you, for thinking you’re worth anything, and that includes you. Are you really going to let this happen again Johnny—_ and it’s too late for John to grab his comm, but he’s not on the floor yet, he thinks he’s sitting in an armchair, just him and someone, something else behind him, and his body is telling him to run and this time flight will be enough.

John shoots out of his seat and tries to make a break for it. In a prettier world, he’d succeed. He’d run and he’d be able to hide and he’d poke his head out of his room later and everything would be fine, he’ll be the only person who’ll know about this close call, but John does not live in a pretty world, and this isn’t a very big room, and he trips. 

(He used to be quick on his feet. Now what is he?)

He falls to his knees, but no one pushes him against the floor, not yet, and it takes him just a split second to turn over and scramble so that his back’s against the wall. This is the best he can do. His arms are still free, and his face? He brings his hands to his face and with vicious desperation he digs his ragged fingernails into his skin and drags them down to check that there’s nothing there because like hell, _like hell_ he’s going to let anyone hurt him again. 

If he’d pulled this hard back then, would he have gotten the hand off? In spite of all that demonic strength, all that bulk? Did he pull this hard? 

The demon is behind him, one arm wrapped around John’s chest, one hand covering John’s face, and John’s kicking and trying to open his mouth and he has to use both hands, he has to use both bloody hands to try and pull the one over his face down, and it barely budges. It only presses harder. 

John’s own fingernails sting against his face and that’s right, the hand isn’t here now, but when it _was_ there it just pressed harder until he knew he was going to exhaust himself with this struggling, going to pass out if he didn’t conserve his oxygen, and when he was tossed to the floor, maybe that’s around the time the coat came off and he just didn’t notice because the already-abused back of his head bounced off the concrete and the few seconds before and after that turned black and when he came back he was on his front and the demon had his tie from behind. 

It almost made John gasp for air against the hand, which was still covering his face even when his front was against the floor—bloody acrobatic, that—before the tie snapped. 

And John tried to come back to earth, he tried to get himself _back into fighting shape_ through the whole sorry thing, because it was all he could do. It was all he could think to do. 

John struggles to bring himself back so he doesn’t fade into the attack and shut himself away to make it hurt less, because he’s not a child anymore and he can save himself now, but not if he gives up, and actually, actually, he thinks the attack is over and he’s on the Waverider, which means that, if there’s some creature here, he has to banish it before it can get to the others too.

They can defend themselves, but they shouldn’t have to, if he’s here, and he can still defend himself too. It’s not too late. There’s time. He ought to call for back-up, just in case. John’s always been prepared.

(It just happened so…)

But John’s having trouble breathing, trouble calling Gideon, if she’s even working right now, and so there may be no way to call, and he breathes quickly, harshly, and tries to slow it down. He can’t lose oxygen. He can’t pass out. 

Fingernails scrape down his face again, removing the hand exactly like he couldn’t then, and the pain, it helped him come back, to feel it—the way his skin tore, the way fingers dug into the side of his face, the burn of concrete against his wrists and the palms of his hands and his shoulders, and, most importantly, the cross he’d had in his pocket grinding at his hip, because he’d noticed earlier that it’d slipped out when his trousers were pulled down, and he’d managed to cover it with his body. 

The sounds—the ripping of clothes, his attempts at words, his choked, unsatisfying pained noises, the much more satisfied noises coming from above him, the steady stream of taunts his spinning head couldn’t make out, his own eventual silence—helped him come back too.

Seeing was harder, as his eyes readjusted to the dimness and his vision blurred as he tried to scan the room for his holy water, but he didn’t need it, really, it’d just have made things easier, and he tried to keep everything in mind, tried to keep reality in mind as he made a plan.

John doesn’t have the luxury of ignoring reality. 

There’s blood in his mouth. He kept biting his tongue and inner cheeks and lips trying to speak, and now the blood is running down his throat. His nails scrape down to his chin, and he takes note of the pain again and it’s different. This is different.

This danger is different.

(Don’t let it happen again.)

His vision is blurred and mostly covered up by his own hands. His arms are free. He tries his best to feel. Listen.

His heart beating against his chest, his breaths wet and gasping against his palms, back against the wall. No one can come up behind him now. Voices surround him, bodies surround him, they say to give him some space and crowd close. More than one familiar voice. There’s lots of people here; he isn’t sure if that makes things worse or better. Did he call for back-up this time? Was it a mistake?

There’s something wrong. He doesn’t know where he is. He knows exactly where he is. He knows exactly who he’s with. He’s clawed his way back; it doesn’t feel like a victory. 

This should hurt more, he thinks. This should all hurt more. He digs his fingernails into his cheeks and that hurts. It hurts more than it did the first time. Good. 

John is not all right. 

John hears voices, still, and he tries to make them out. The words aren’t so slurred and mixed up in his head. It’s pounding, but there’s no blood. He didn’t hit it this time. 

This time is different. This time is going to be different. 

He doesn’t know what touched him. He thinks that the people around him aren’t on the offensive, but he hasn’t looked yet. Before trying to make words out, he settles and tries to make out voices, assuring himself that they’re real. Zari. Sara. Ava. Behrad. Nate. All talking over each other, talking to each other, talking to him, he doesn’t know if they’re talking to him, but if they are maybe they’re saying something important. Maybe things have changed, maybe they’re saying things he doesn’t want to hear, and those are the most important things. He strains to tune in.

He hears, “John, stop, you’re bleeding!” 

His fingernails and the pads of his fingers are wet, and he doesn’t really want to see or understand what he’s done, so he just keeps at it, tears at himself because this should hurt. This should leave marks. 

Hands on his wrists, but they’re long-fingered, slim, and he’s stronger and he breaks out of that hold with desperation. He knows it’s probably Zari, but he can’t take the risk, and he digs into his face, goes deeper and deeper, and he’s not sure if it hurts anymore or if it just hurts enough that it’s stopped feeling like pain.

Hands again, bigger this time, like the one attached to whatever came at him from behind earlier, grabbing his wrists, forcing his hands away from his face, and John’s mind sparks with magic. Everything else is gone except for the threat, a blurred outline of exactly what he didn’t want to see, not much taller than him but bigger, and John has to assess this new threat, so he forces his head up and there’s nothing there but a friend. 

That should calm him, but something horrible is happening, and he can’t be calm, and this is a threat. 

_He just doesn’t want you to hurt yourself, think about it, you’re hurting yourself,_ and John closes and opens his eyes and the threat is still there because just like he can see a demon in a man’s eyes he can see steel in a man’s skin.

And the vicious, desperate voice in John’s head is saying, _that’s right. He can be possessed too, remember? He can get stronger too, he can change, what would steel feel like against your face? What would it feel like against your body? Have you ever thought about why they’d want you? He came up behind you. He's touching you. What do you think? Do you get what I’m implying don’t you see what you are without your voice? Say something before they realize the one thing you’re good for when you’re not good for anything. Why are you like this? So pathetic, you know who these people are you’re making a fool of yourself but first get him off of you get him off of you, you don’t know anymore—_

John stammers out an attempt to light up. Flames only lick at his hands, but it’s enough. Nate— _it’s just Nate, you idiot, you’ve met teddy bears more frightening than Nate but good on you for being careful come on you knob all he does is protect you yes but if someone is strong enough to protect you they’re strong enough to hurt you why else do they want you to stop hurting yourself—_ lets go of John and scrambles back, and John snarls at him and says, “Don't you touch me! Nothing’s going to hurt me, I won’t let it—”

“John, neither will we!” 

John stops talking, his teeth clicking as he shuts his mouth. 

_Neither will we._

“I’m sorry we weren’t there,” Ava continues, and the sound John makes isn’t one he can place. He thinks it might be laughter.

“You don’t understand,” John murmurs. “It's not your bloody fault you weren’t there, it was mine, I didn’t think to...when I thought to...it was late, I was late, but I didn’t want you to, I didn’t even think of you, I didn’t want you there,” he says. The words are almost unintelligible. He can’t figure out which story to tell. He’s already told the truth, but he hates that one. 

“It was bad luck,” Sara says, her voice raw and sad. “We all get taken by surprise.”

“No,” John says, because he isn’t going to let the truth overtake him anymore. “No. Not me. I lied. That’s not how any of it happened. No one got hurt, no one needed help.” 

The words spill out, mumbling, rambling, and after so many years of things happening that he wanted to change it got easier and easier to change them in his head. He got better and better at rewriting history, and then a ghost shoved the past in his face and he started to think about it and then the demon and now he needs to go back to what was easier. 

John’s a liar. 

Why wouldn’t he lie about this?

(Why _would_ he lie about this?) 

“I never even thought of you,” he says. “Didn’t even remember you existed. Not like I’ve ever needed help. Don’t matter how awful things got, I never needed help.” 

The room is full of the kind of silence that makes John choke, and he looks around, scans all the faces and the bodies in this place. The sadness, the disbelief. No one knows what to say. His gaze pauses on the person, the familiar person who touched him today, just like he used to (when things were all right), and for a moment he feels a burst of wounded anger. 

He shouldn’t feel this way about people so familiar, and he was holding back, he was able to hold back, he was getting used to it, getting over it, he’s been getting over it so why now? Why’d everyone have to see this? They weren’t meant to witness this scared self who doesn’t want to face reality. He didn’t mean for any of this to happen. No one had to know, and—how dare they, anyway? 

How dare they be the same people they were four months ago, when this is apparently what’s become of him?

“Go away,” he tells Nate, who’s standing by the doorway with Mick. “Just get out of my sight.” The words are thin and bitter and deeply unkind, and Mick grunts and grabs Nate’s shoulder. Nate’s eyes are wide and hurt, and John looks away and whispers, “I don’t want you here right now.” 

“C’mon, Pretty,” Mick says, and then there are footsteps that fade away.

It doesn’t really make John relax, knowing they’ve gone, but some of the tension goes out of his body because they left when he told them to, and he melts back against the wall and looks at his hands. They’re bloodier than he thought they’d be. He hasn’t scratched himself up so badly since Ravenscar. He’d gone mad, back then. Is he mad now? 

He curls his hands into loose fists and sees gore under his fingernails.

He did that.

He licks his lips with no trouble. There’s nothing covering his face.

“I’m not afraid,” he whispers, voice clear because the demon let go of him weeks and weeks ago. He wanted to make sure, is all, and then he made sure and he still didn’t stop because if this is all still going to hurt, he doesn’t want it to be over nothing. He doesn’t want it to be over ghosts, phantom limbs that weren’t even his. He’d rather hurt on his own terms. He deserves to hurt, but he wants to choose how. “I’m exhausted.” 

There’s a long moment of silence. John breathes slowly. He has to conserve oxygen. He feels like falling asleep. Calm. High on the lingering fumes of pointless adrenaline. If he’s safe here after all, then he can lose himself for a moment.

“We should get him to medical,” Ava says. “Before the scratches start really setting in.” 

“Yeah, let’s get you to medical, John,” Behrad says, a note of forced cheeriness in his voice that makes a low laugh rumble in John’s throat, inaudible.

He stands mechanically, and then, for a moment, hesitates. 

A pang of misery runs through him as he realizes that he’s not sure how he’s supposed to move like this. He feels like he’s both bound and weightless. He’s become a ghost.

“Where do I go now?” he asks himself under his breath, looking down at the floor as if it’ll be of any use to him.

Fingers brush against his. He sees them well before they touch him, and he knows who it is, and doesn’t mind her. He knows who all of these people hovering anxiously around him are, though he can’t be sure what they’re waiting for, and he knows that in the future he’ll regret all of this, the distant comfort he’s taking in their presence included.

He holds out his hand palm-up to show Zari that it’s smeared with blood. He’s trying to let her know that she’s not going to want to touch him, but she seems to confuse his warning for an invitation, and she takes his hand. She threads her fingers through his, and he can feel her shudder, but she doesn’t pull away. 

She pulls at him instead so he’ll move, and he follows her, because at this point he’s at least aware enough to believe she has some idea of where he ought to go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 6 - Little Mr. Fix-It  
> Summary: John is not at his best. He and Behrad have a conversation. Doesn’t go well.


	6. Little Mr. Fix-It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John is not at his best. He and Behrad have a conversation. Doesn’t go well.

John is no stranger to getting ahead of himself. After it goes badly, though—and it almost always goes badly—he usually ends up taking the opposite route and pressing pause on his entire existence for a bit, and the disastrous movie night isn’t any different. 

“Hey, John?” Zari says, and John opens his eyes. He hasn’t been sleeping, just resting with his eyes closed, but he might as well open them for Zari. In spite of being in her room, he hasn’t talked to her much in the past two days, and he should probably acknowledge her presence. 

She’s sitting on the bed, looking down at him. She runs her hand through his hair, which is soothing. At this rate, he’s going to actually fall asleep, which he doesn’t want to do. He’d prefer to stay in the liminal space he’s perfected drifting into through the years. He doesn’t shake her off. 

“I have to go work,” she says, and John mumbles something out. Possibly “good,” because Zari’s been spending a lot of time with him, and he knows he’s not much fun right now. Too much longer of this and she’ll get about as tired of him as he is, which is very.

“Pretty sure you can come out of your hidey-hole slash my bed soon,” Zari says. “Everyone’s had time to chill. I talked to them.”

“So you yelled at them?” John asks, and Zari pointedly doesn’t answer.

“Don’t matter, love. They’re not capable of being chill,” John mutters. “Except your brother, sometimes. Especially after all that. Rehabilitate my image my arse, you never thought it was gonna work, did you?”

“...I mean, it kind of, like, hinged on you being okay, so. Not really. Sorry.”

She actually sounds a bit apologetic, but John doesn’t have the energy to be angry at her, so he just makes a disgruntled noise. 

Zari strokes his hair again, and says, “Okay, I’m gonna go. I’ll bring you food later, but after that you’re on your own, because this is the third day and I’m not your mom.”

John snorts and angles his head to look up at Zari, who’s wrinkled her nose, having just realized that that might’ve been an imperfect thing to say. “Is this the part where I remind you that my mum died in childbirth and it’s all very tragic?”

“No,” Zari says, “because then I’ll feel bad.”

John gives her a vague smug smile, but then his energy goes and he sinks back into quiet dread. He doesn’t want to know what’s outside that door. Well, he’s been to the bathroom, so he knows exactly what’s outside that door, but he hasn’t seen anyone. They might be avoiding him in lieu of being chill, and he’s not sure how to feel about that. It’s what he wants, right? He avoided them first.

He shudders to think of what’s going to happen next time they have a mission. 

He doesn’t want to think about it. Or anything. 

Zari presses a kiss to the side of his head. “See you later,” she murmurs.

“G’night, love,” John says in nonsensical response, given that it’s definitely not night-time, and then he closes his eyes, hoping he won’t sleep. The other night he woke up with his hands clutching his hair and bile in his mouth, covered in cold sweat, with Zari trying to soothe him from the other side of the room, and he’s not keen to go through that again. John’s no stranger to nightmares—he’s had more of them than good dreams in his life, not to mention the many he’s witnessed—but he can’t deny that they’ve gotten worse since it happened. Maybe it’s just because there’s a new monster to star in them. 

John feels a surge of bitterness at the thought. _You did this to yourself,_ he thinks, and his breathing slows.

John is in his childhood room. He recognizes it immediately even though everything is dim. There’s blood in his hair. There is pounding on the door. 

John trips over something but doesn’t fall. Reaches down, picks it up. A plush cat. Cheryl’s. It used to be on her bed; she left it on his when she left, along with her letter. It had a name, he does not remember it. John stares down at its red button eyes and is reminded that he’s all alone. The pounding gets louder and louder until it’s the only thing he can hear. He clenches his jaw. The door is shaking off its hinges. It splinters at the edges. 

For a moment, John thinks it’s Dad, but he stumbles back against a broken washer and he realizes that it’s not. The door finally breaks into a spray of splinters that are more like broken glass. John crouches down and covers his head protectively. “John Constantine,” a deep, surprisingly smooth voice echoing with demonic energy says. “John Constantine, look what’s become of you. I’m going to have so much fun with you.” John is still holding Cheryl’s plush cat. He buries his face in it and—

There’s a hand on John’s shoulder, shaking him, and John screams, full-throated, but it’s muffled by something soft pressed against his face. Cheryl’s plush cat. 

_Wait._

It’s a pillow. John’s managed to grab onto a pillow and press his face against it. He gasps for air, but it restricts his breathing. After some inelegant flailing, he manages to toss the pillow to the floor and untangle himself from Zari’s silk sheets. His heart pounds in his throat and he feels dizzy. He hates that dream, its horrible familiarity dashed with the novelty of the events of the last few months. He scrubs at his hair.

“Bloody hell,” he gasps out, trying to catch his breath, and he shakes his head. 

“John?” someone who is definitely not Zari, who is usually the only witness to his nightmares (other than Nate, back before everything happened, given how often they’ve shared the library John not-uncommonly slept in, but he’d rather not think about Nate right now), says. “Are you okay?”

“Smashing,” John mutters, staring down at his bare, bruised knees. “What are you doing here, B?”

“I thought I heard fighting,” Behrad says, and John gives him a sideways look. Given the slight reddish glassiness to Behrad’s eyes, John is relatively sure Behrad’s high. However high he is, though, he’s still staring at John like he’s looking at a particularly wretched puppy, and John doesn’t have the patience for it. 

“Just a particularly athletic dream, squire. And stop looking at me like that.”

Behrad widens his eyes, schooling his face into a look of innocent shock. “Look at you like what?”

“Like I’m about to spontaneously combust and you’re _really sad about it.”_

Behrad snorts. “Okay.” He doesn’t leave, instead leaning against the doorframe, and John clenches his teeth. His jaw hurts. “So, like...how are you?” Behrad asks, and when John groans he continues with, “Okaaaay, I’m guessing you don’t want to answer that question.” He frowns, as if he’s looking for something to bring up. “Uh...right! You’ve lost weight,” Behrad continues, and John groans again.

“How would you know?”

“...Because I regularly look at you and also you’re not wearing a shirt right now and I can see your ribs?” 

John’s never been much good at feeding himself when he’s down, so he’s not surprised, even with how little he’s been looking in the mirror. “All right, why do you care?”

“Of course I care,” Behrad responds, sounding vaguely confused, and John looks at him annoyed.

“I asked _why.”_

“‘Cause...you’re my friend?” 

John gives him a flat look, and Behrad shrugs, seeming a bit put out. “I’m not lying.”

He is clearly not. 

(When John and Behrad first met, John would call him Little Mr. Fix-It, a nickname that Behrad hated and that was objectively inappropriate on its surface, given that Behrad’s got a good four inches on John. Below the surface, though—yeah, it worked. It works. Behrad likes fixing things. Even when there’s no chance of success. Even when he’s high and only came by because he thought he heard a struggle, and, of course, decided to come in and see if it was a fixable situation, and then decided to stay, probably because he’s both stoned and young enough to be an optimist.) 

“I know,” John mutters. “Worst part, that.” 

Behrad gives him another plainly sympathetic look, and John says, “You can go now.” He’s all right being alone at this moment, willing to live with it to not have to speak.

“Oh,” Behrad says, and doesn’t leave.

John looks at his knees again. They’re drawn up almost to his chest, and he grimaces and forces himself into a more relaxed position, wondering if he could cover at least his lower half with the blanket without looking like he’s purposefully covering his lower half with the blanket. He rubs at his arm and wishes he had something on other than pants. Not usually something he cares too much about. He even used to sleep naked, most of the time. It’s different lately, like most things seem to be. 

John glances around for his red robe, and sees it hanging over one of Zari’s chairs. 

He stares at the robe, wishing he could do something to bring it closer, but anything he could do would make it obvious that he wants to bring it closer. He’s always worn his clothes like a very DIY protective spell, and that’s something he feels keenly these days.

Especially with what happened the other night. John’s stomach lurches at the thought.

Behrad was there, then. Everyone was there. Everyone saw. 

John runs his hands through his hair, fingers searching his scalp for nonexistent abrasions. He leaves one hand against his unbloodied hair, and the other travels to his collarbone and then his shoulder, arm crossing over his bare chest. His shoulder was bruised, after, skin raw from friction, dirt rubbed into it from the unswept concrete floor. That’s all gone now. John presses his palm against his clammy skin.

 **(** John clutches at his own shirt, tugs at his own tie with the hand that’s not still holding Zari’s. Once he’s on the medchair he moves on to patting at his pockets and scraping his nails up the thigh of his trousers. They’re still on. He looks down. Buttoned, zipped up. Of course they are. No reason they wouldn’t be. 

There’s a cross in his left pocket. A flask of holy water in the right one, even though it’s not usually necessary for any old exorcism. Would’ve been helpful, though, but it was in the pocket of his coat. He doesn’t have his coat and he doesn’t know if there are any-old-exorcisms anymore. His hand trembles spasmodically in Zari’s. 

Someone is trying to put something on his face, some kind of muzzle, he thinks, even though he can see Ava over him and he can see it’s just the mask Gideon uses to best fix facial abrasions. He ought to be able to stiff-upper-lip that. He’s put the thing on enough lately. Hasn’t had a problem with it.

“The mask makes him nervous,” Zari explains as John twists his neck away from it, pressing his throbbing cheek to the headrest of the medchair, and John begins to suspect that he may have been overestimating how poised he’s been the past few weeks. 

“John, please stay still, you can do it,” Ava says, a hopeful lilt to her voice, as if she’s trying to give a pep talk, and John lets out a ragged laugh. Of course he can do it.

Zari’s hand slips from his, and he clenches his fist. He can put the mask on himself, and he wants to say that, but he’s locked his jaw. Zari’s hand is on the side of his head. She’s not pushing, but it’s firm. He forces himself to untwist his neck, to look straight ahead, straight up. 

As she fits the mask over his face, Ava says, “That’s great, you’re doing great.”

“Bugger off,” John grits out, the words echoing. He’s panting, his breaths fogging up the plastic of the mask. 

_Stop, stop, stop, you wanker, stop,_ he tells himself. He needs to get himself under control. He’s never had this reaction to the mask before, whether or not it makes him nervous. Trouble breathing, prickling all over his body. But he’s never had a reaction to Nate’s supposedly-familiar hand on him either. _Stop. Don’t do this, don’t do this._

“Sh, it’s okay,” Behrad says like he’s talking to a child, and John realizes he was saying that out loud.

He grinds his teeth. He tries to make his breaths even out. His throat closes but he lets it. If he passes out this’ll no doubt be less horrible, and he can probably do that now. He is surrounded, but at this point he knows who’s here, and it doesn’t wire him with adrenaline, just makes the adrenaline leak out instead. 

He closes his eyes. He thinks Gideon gave him something. Trigger-happy with the sedatives, she is. 

The scratches are closing, scabbing over, disappearing completely. They burn as they go. **)**

There’s something soft, only barely brushing against John. He blinks. The room has blurred, he notes as it comes back into focus. He’s been staring at the chair with his robe on it without really seeing it. He knows because Behrad must’ve noticed, since the robe isn’t on the chair anymore. Behrad’s holding it out to him.

With leaden arms, John takes it. “Ta,” he breathes out, mortification heating up his body. 

Behrad takes several hasty steps back, as if John’s going to bite him, and John looks down at the robe. 

“...John?” Behrad says, voice high-pitched and wary, and John gives the robe a twitchy smile. He uncurls—which means he curled up again, sod it all—to shrug it on. Heavy as his body feels, he does feel better after, even if his legs are still mostly bare. Another layer between him and the world, and since it’s not on the chair anymore, it’s another excuse not to get out of bed. “Are you, like...here?” Behrad asks. “Right now?”

A laugh that feels like a painful cough slips from John’s mouth. “How high are you, squire? Course I’m here. Where else would I be?” 

“Right, yeah,” Behrad says. “Yeah.” 

“I’m going back to sleep,” John murmurs, giving Behrad another sideways look, and Behrad makes a face.

“Are you just gonna sleep forever? Is that your plan? Even though you…”

“Well, it’s more like lying in bed and trying not to think, but saying that, it’d make you…” John sighs. “Make you give me that look again, the one you’re giving me right now.” Feeling distant again and loose-lipped with it, John says, “In Ravenscar, and when I say Ravenscar I mean Ravenscar Institution for the Mentally Deranged, the group therapist used to ask us, ‘what do you want?’” John lets slip a bitter smirk. “And I’d say, ‘I want to stop dreaming, and then sleep forever.’” 

Silence falls over the room again, and John, expecting a stammered “uh, maybe I should go” or something of the sort, feels a stab of painful victory. This is above Behrad’s pay grade. It’s above all their pay grades, really, except for probably John’s, who’s been paying for things—though only metaphorically, of course—since the day he was born. 

Behrad doesn’t bugger off, unfortunately, and John’s victory turns into annoyance. At least it cuts through the distance, and he shakes himself out of whatever stupor he found himself in and actually looks right at Behrad instead of sideways.

Behrad’s giving him a disturbed look, like he has no idea what to do with that statement but apparently hasn’t figured out that he’s not supposed to do anything. “Uhhhh,” he says, and John raises his eyebrows.

“That was your cue to leave,” he says helpfully, and Behrad, who John thought was too high for this but who might be just high enough, wrinkles his nose.

“Okay, so, I’m not really gonna ask, ‘cause I don’t know if I’m gonna understand the logic behind that, because, no offense, half the time you kind of have sad high logic—”

“I take a lot of offense to that, actually.”

“—even though, considering, I might, but...wait. No, I’m saying. How worried should we be on a scale of one to ten?”

Well, this has gone completely wrong. “Zero,” John deadpans. “You should be zero worried.” 

“It’s just, you’re being worrying.”

“I am not.” 

“I like how a lot of the time you say something, and it’s the most obvious lie ever, but you still say it with a straight face.”

“I like how a lot of the lot of the time you say something, but you have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

Behrad rolls his eyes, and then he takes a deep breath that John knows is going to be followed by something he isn’t interested in hearing. “By the way, we’re at ten. We are ten worried.”

“Seriously, why are you doing this?” John asks, and Behrad finally launches into a flustered explanation.

“I mean, the story is more like, Nate and I were smoking, and he feels really bad, and I mean, what happened was pretty scary, and I thought I’d check on you because you’re, you _are_ my friend, and then I was like, no, maybe I should just leave him alone, but then I heard everything from inside and I was like, yikes, and Nate…” 

“So you thought you’d play little Mr. Fix-It, eh?” John says, his annoyance starting to turn into embarrassed anger. He clenches his fists. “Bugger off,” he snarls. “I don’t want to talk. I’ll leave the room, all right? Tell all the nags on this useless ship that I’ll leave the room and I’ll be at the top of my fucking game and you can all sod off. Stop being worried, I’m an adult and I’ve been through a hell of a lot worse than this and I don’t need your help and I don’t _want_ your help,” John spits out, rambling. “I never did!” 

(He really has been through a hell of a lot worse, hasn’t he? He’s literally been through Hell. 

Thirty unpleasant minutes that didn’t kill anyone, didn’t hurt anyone—that can’t affect him.

Not when he always comes out on the other side.) 

Behrad sighs. “Fine. Sure. We don’t have to talk.” 

“Glad you finally figured that out,” John mutters. There’s no reason to talk anyway, or be so concerned. Not like he’s ever done anything for them. 

“Remember that time I had a panic attack and you helped me breathe through it?” Behrad asks apropos of nothing. “And when you taught me card games just to distract me when I was freaked out? And the time you sat with me under a table in the lab for like an hour?”

John rubs the back of his neck, grimacing. Yeah, that one hurt. “Sure,” he mutters. “Your point?”

“It’s not like we care about you out of nowhere,” Behrad says. “It’s not like you’ve never done anything for us.” 

“You died,” John says, uncomfortable with Behrad’s apparent newfound telepathy. “Bit different.” 

“You went through something pretty bad too,” Behrad starts, and John finally puts his head in his hands, because he doesn’t want to hear that. He can’t hear that. He doesn't want to have this conversation, he wishes they’d never had this conversation, this is the problem with other people, this is the problem with them knowing, this is the problem with him, he doesn’t know how to live with this and neither do they and he is getting the intolerable feeling that there’s nothing that can help but time.

“Stop, B,” he says, hating the defeat in his voice. “Please just stop.” He can’t take this anymore. 

Behrad stops. “Oh,” he says. “Shit. Sorry, John, I just…” 

“I need you to go away,” John says. “Leave me alone.” This is too much noise for one day, too much humiliation, too many attempts at facing reality and John’s tired of it. He’s already had one nightmare today, he doesn’t feel like having his face shoved in another, thanks. 

“Okay,” Behrad says. “We don’t have to talk, I shouldn’t have, I don’t know why…”

“Behrad!” John says sharply. “Go away! Can someone just bloody _listen_ to me when I speak?”

“Yeah,” Behrad says, sounding a little shell-shocked. “Yeah, dude. I’ll...I’ll see you later.”

John nods, head still in his hands. _Finally._ “See you later,” he mutters. 

The door opens and closes, and then John’s on his own. He doesn’t know if it’s comforting or not, but at least the pressure’s gone.

He drags his nails down his face, but it only stings a little. He doubts it even leaves a mark, but he forces himself to move his hand. It’ll look bad. He registers that he’s curled up again, exactly like he didn’t want to be. The right thing to do would be scramble to his feet and fight, but there’s nothing to fight right now. He clutches at the soft red fabric of the robe draped over his legs, and his other hand goes on his forehead like he’s checking for a fever. He leans his covered forehead on his knees. Christ, he must be a sorry sight. 

He sits in bed for what might be hours, trying not to think about the world he’s going to have to rejoin soon. The life he’s got that he can’t avoid. The life he’s got that he doesn’t even want to avoid, not most of the time. At least he didn’t before. 

But there’s still hands on him, and it’s too late to fight.

(He did fight, he points out to himself. He did what he had to do to survive.

Still too late. 

So many ways it could’ve gone differently.

He doesn’t know why he can’t think of that many.) 

There’s a knock on the door of his room. Zari’s room. The door opens, and John swallows down some kind of sound. 

“John?” Zari asks, her voice wary and small. “I heard. I’m sorry.”

“Still think it was a good idea to tell?” John asks bitterly, and Zari just sits on the bed and says nothing. John doesn’t know what to do either, so they make a good pair. 

He’s tired. Gideon could give him some kind of sedative, probably, but they gave him sedatives in Ravenscar and he’d still dream through them, and besides, he doesn’t want to sleep through anything important. 

He sees terrible things when he closes his eyes. He closes them anyway. 

“I need to get out of here,” he says after too much time has passed. Zari’s on her phone, and she looks over at him.

“Ready to rejoin the real world?” she asks, sounding a little more hesitant than she’s been all the times she’s talked about that before. 

“Maybe tomorrow,” John says. “I’ll be all better.” 

“...Right,” Zari says. 

“What, you don’t believe me?”

“I...” Zari says, and then she trails off.

John makes an unhappy sound of agreement. 

+

The next day, John actually dresses himself and leaves the room with the intent of doing things other than just going to the bathroom, which shouldn’t be any kind of victory and isn’t really, but it is at least something, the beginning of him moving on from what happened earlier. Of everyone moving on. 

Again, he points out to himself. He was already trying to do the moving on thing the first time. Whatever.

What John has to do is set an example. He’s generally not the person to look to for any sort of example of anything, but this is about him, and he’s always tried to—what would Zari call it?— _curate his image_ too. Make himself into something stronger and more dangerous. Like a glamour. 

Like magic.

Usually glamours don’t fall on their own, but sometimes they get forced off. John feels like he’s been forced a lot, lately. 

(The magic’s well and truly gone now, isn’t it?)

Like her brother, who Zari assures him has learned from his mistakes, whatever that’s supposed to mean, Zari brings up his ribs. He feels like a xylophone, she accuses, which is both overdramatic and a disturbing enough mental image to make John want to eat more. 

There’s no one in the galley, and John breathes a sigh of relief, because he’s still dreading talking to the others. Looking at the others. The only one who’s come by is Behrad, who John knows has not given a glowing review of John’s current status even though, frankly, that one took two to tango, and John feels shaky on his feet. He doesn’t want to fall and for everyone to see.

 _Again,_ his mind tells him, and he tells it to shut up. It’s not helping. He just stumbled, is all. He’s fine now. Maybe that moment just had to get out of his system.

Drinking one of the meal replacements Gary’s so crazy about, John fiddles with the buttons on his coat with his free hand and considers his next move past only making it through the day. It’s a bit more of a struggle than he’d like. He knows he’s been doing things. He just hasn’t felt it, and now he feels like he’s marooned himself.

Maybe he’ll go to the library. When he thinks about it, he’s been in the library a lot, these past short months, even if burying himself in books and papers has kept him from registering much other than brief shocks of panic when he’s realized he’s letting his guard down. Those shocks tend to send him back to his room. Or make him reach for his flask. Or at least put his coat back on. Or give Nate, who’s often around, a surreptitious look to make sure he’s still there, settled on the sofa or desk in a space that’ll make it impossible to not see him if he gets up.

But he spends a lot of time in the library. He did even before. That’s the reason he was spending time there when trying to hide. It’s normal for him. He has to be normal for him. 

John needs to stop forgetting what’s normal for him, or it’ll mean that how he’s acting these days is normal for him now and he can’t take the thought. 

John shakes himself out of his reverie. At this point, he has apparently drunk two meal replacements, according to the empty bottles. His stomach is churning, but at least it’s full. He usually has a pretty good appetite, so that's a win. He throws away the bottles and leaves for the library. 

He doesn't consider what he might find.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 7 - Give Him Some Space  
> Summary: Zari goes off-ship for a work thing. John takes this worse than he expected, which might have to do with how the others are avoiding him.
> 
> +
> 
> Thanks for reading and please comment to tell me what you thought if you’re so inclined. :)


	7. Give Him Some Space

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zari goes off-ship for a work thing. John takes this worse than he expected, which might have to do with how the others are avoiding him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ngl, in spite of the fact that this chapter is mostly just "John's mental health takes a nosedive, but don't worry, there's a hug," it was really hard to write. I hope it works for you, though?

The library doors make their soothing whooshing sound as they slide open, and John breathes a sigh of relief as he steps inside. 

Then he hears a sound of surprise from the side of the room. John starts, swinging his head over to the noise, and his relief evaporates as he wonders how he didn’t consider the possibility that someone would be in the library. 

Or, more specifically, that _Nate_ would be in the library, even though John is more than used to sharing the library with him at this point. 

Anyway, Nate’s in the library.

Nate, who John has always gotten along with pretty well. Who touches him with little hesitation. John thinks he ruined that. Nate was normal, at movie night, and John ruined it. 

The thing is that John likes Nate and even, yes, trusts him, but there are moments that he doesn’t know who people are, is the problem. When he can’t make sure they’re themselves. But when he knows who Nate is, he feels fine. Better than fine. 

That’s how it is with everyone. Nate just has the unfortunate distinction of being close in frame to the demon, and that shouldn’t be an issue and John _hates_ that it’s been.

And then what happened during John’s stumble—he didn’t expect that. 

Because he actually did know who Nate was, and _yet,_ and that’s a reaction he still can’t explain. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to, but looking at Nate now, he doesn’t feel how he did in that panicked moment. He feels like how he’s felt the past few months, like he’s with someone he can sneak a look at to make himself feel better about his chances if something were to attack him.

Or he would, if he weren’t busy feeling humiliated, because, as John stands awkwardly in the doorway, staring at Nate, who is staring back wide-eyed, he realizes that Nate doesn’t think John’s just feeling awkward and caught off-guard. 

Nate’s gaze is saturated with worry and a tinge of hurt, as if he’s about to come into contact with an injured animal that’s unfairly but understandably leery of him, and yeah, he definitely thinks John’s afraid of him.

John has the horrible suspicion that Nate now thinks John’s been hiding some kind of deep fear of him ever since it happened instead of literally the opposite, and it all just...boiled over at movie night. 

He wants to kick himself for not taking into account the possibility that Nate would be in the library and for not already having figured out something to say to him in the first place. Behrad even said that Nate _felt really bad,_ and John wishes he’d cooked up some kind of casual way to explain that there was no reason to. That it was all just a big misunderstanding. 

He wishes he’d come up with some smooth way to shut down any further conversation about any of it, because if he could do that, he’d be able to just act normal after and show Nate that he’s not bleeding afraid of him. 

The whole thing’s more complicated than that, but he wouldn’t mention that bit. He'd focus on the part where he's not afraid.

John would show Nate that he’s all right, and in that way show everyone that he’s all right, and it would be…

It would be all right.

But John froze in the doorway, which means he did everything wrong, as usual, and now it’s too late to act like it means nothing that he and Nate have been looking at each other unable to access their social fucking protocols for maybe a full minute now. 

John wants to melt into the ground and become one with his surroundings and communicate with the others via Gideon and just Gideon, the only person on this ship who isn’t being hopelessly weird.

Nate puts down his book slowly, and then puts his hands up, looking for all the world like he’s actually going to make an attempt to communicate with a mistreated animal and not his teammate who has saved his life multiple times (and also kind of killed him once), and John could die, he really could. 

Nate opens his mouth, and John, dreading the possibility of Nate bloody Heywood setting the tone for a conversation about John’s admittedly easily misconstrued recent behavior, cuts his losses and does what he does best. 

He turns around and leaves. 

+

There comes a certain point in a situation where even John has to admit that he’s not sure what to do. 

He is at that point.

Zari’s assured him that she’s talked to the others yet again, told them to back off yet again, and John, who doesn’t particularly want his girlfriend playing middlewoman but also doesn’t _not_ want her to do that and thus says nothing, wonders if it’ll stick, and how. Behrad, he suspects, is embarrassed, and John can’t help but think, with a not-unfamiliar bitterness, that he should be. 

It’s been a week, and John's pretty sure that the lesson’s stuck. Unfortunately, backing off isn’t acting normal. It’s what John was tired of before, the opposite of the pushing that he apparently can’t take, but, possibly, worse. The others are still giving him those kicked-dog looks (either he is the kicked dog or they are; it depends) and now they’re outright avoiding him, leaving whenever they see him, and doesn’t know how to say that that’s the exact opposite of what he wants most of the time. Doesn’t know how to say anything. 

He can’t sleep at night until Zari’s there, and in spite of the discomfort at the awkwardness, he thinks he’s still, in some way, able to breathe easier with the others around, not that they’ve been around much. Haven't been around much since they found out, actually, and then, after the incident at movie night and the incident with Behrad, they've just been around less and less. 

He knows they’re not actually trying to act as though he’s got a flesh-eating disease and is at least kind of contagious, or like they’re disgusted with him, no matter how he feels. He’s heard Sara saying, _Give him some space. He needs some space._

(He didn’t hear her say, _I mean, just for a while, until we can figure out how to stop fucking things up._ )

He still can’t help but look at himself and think, _Of course the others gave up._

+

When John he was little, he went to the cinema a lot. First with Cheryl, because there were discount nights and she wanted to get him out of the house, and then alone after she left. He’d go in and find a spot in the cheap seats and watch whatever they put on.

American noir films. Westerns both American and Italian. Those almost shockingly violent Italian films with the screaming and the blood; at least two of which he watched through his fingers, because, desensitized to violence as he was, he was also ten years old. 

The Lucha Libre ones; his favorite. He didn’t understand Spanish until he did, a little, from the movies, but he was always excited when he realized the night's film was one with El Cura. 

John keeps thinking about that, since the disastrous movie night, even though he doesn’t know why he’d suddenly be remembering good things. 

He just wishes he could be there again in the cool, damp, darkness of the theater, surrounded by other people who were too distracted to hurt him, all watching the same thing. An exciting world he wanted to live in on a screen. Feeling that Cheryl was still with him even after she left, because at least she left him with the movies. At least she cared enough about him to teach him how to dream without nightmares. 

John doesn’t know when he forgot that. Maybe when their theater closed when he was still young and the magic wasn’t there in the ones he snuck into, even though he still went. 

When John considers it, he thinks maybe that’s the reason he’s always gone to movie night. It’s the closest he’s ever gotten to _being there again_ , even though he’s rarely ever paid attention to the movies they choose, since they're all newer than what he’s interested in, genres he was never able to get into. 

It all feels very far away now.

John was happy at the movies, once upon a time, but that’s over and done with, and John didn’t know there was anything left that could happen to him that could make him feel so awful. That could make him think so much about things so far before the moment; just sit down and _remember._

Sometimes, when John is brushing his teeth, he doesn’t recognize the man in the mirror, and then he does, and he hates him.

+

John spends a lot of time in the library. Nate doesn’t. John suspects that it’s Nate being thoughtful and sensitive, which, ironically, makes things much harder for John. Everyone’s giving him space, and John has no idea how to say he’d rather have people with him than not, especially when he hasn’t shown it. 

And he suspects that it’s not just the others being sensitive. With them staying away from him, he thinks--well, it must be easier for them, right? He probably did them a favor, losing his mind like that, because now they don’t have to look at him and can tell themselves they’re being kind.

They made him feel like they weren’t angry, like they didn’t judge him, when they found out what happened, but John’s starting to think that he misread. 

The only person who kind of knows about the aching loneliness is Zari, and Zari has a life. John can only almost-guarantee that she’ll be able to spend nights with him. Sara would probably understand, but Sara’s got four other people on this ship to look after, not to mention her captainly duties, which John is sure go beyond what he cares about. 

It does at least make it less likely that he’ll have another disastrous conversation like the one he had with Behrad, and Nate certainly hasn’t tried to approach him since he walked away in the library. John hasn’t tried to approach Nate either, both mortified and unable to figure out what he’d do if Nate were the one to walk away this time. 

Sometimes at night, even with Zari, John could still swear the shadows are moving, but he can’t turn on the lights even when he thinks he hears the shadows start to whisper. At least they don’t talk, not so he can make out the words. They did, at one point, but that was a long time ago. 

John can’t stop thinking. 

+

In the middle of the day when John’s alone (because when he went to the galley everyone sort of smiled at him and asked him _hey how’s it going John_ and he said _take a wild guess_ and then they left, embarrassed and happy, he is sure, to be gifted the chance to give up, so they’re welcome, and he was in the galley on his own and instead of his teammates there were shadows) he whispers, “I need some back-up.”

John is almost certain that if he calls, someone will come, but instead he replicates a bottle of whiskey. “No, no,” he tells himself, “I don’t need help, do I? Course not. Don’t be silly, John-o. You don’t need help. That’s what you think, innit? Didn’t you say that?”

John thinks of Newcastle. Of what happened after Newcastle, when he lost almost everyone and it made perfect sense. 

He drinks until he passes out.

+

John goes to the parlour. Sara and Ava are at date night, Nate and Behrad are playing video games while Zari looks at her phone, and Mick’s with his daughter—he has been for a few days now—and it means there are people here but no one to try and be sensitive and give him space in the most obvious way possible. He’s relieved. 

At this point he’s getting used to all the space. Working around it, just like he did after Newcastle, which went so very well for him. At least he’s got Gideon, who’d see, hopefully, if something went wrong. 

(Unless there was something she couldn’t perceive and it happened too fast for him to yell and he got stunned and there was nothing he—but that’s not how the story goes.)

He sits in the armchair he wasn’t sitting in a week and a few days ago when he had his...fit, and asks Gideon to turn on the television and put on one of those movies with El Cura. Those old Mexican movies, yeah?

Even before he’s done asking, she’s put one on, and John turns up the volume too loud and just watches. 

He remembers the mission in Mexico. He felt like a Legend, for a moment. He felt happy. It didn’t last, not really, not the happiness or the trust, but it didn’t go away either. 

He remembers being nine years old, Cheryl having left not too long ago, and he was in the cinema, watching some bloke in a golden suit beat up demons while speaking a language he didn’t understand. And John was cheering. And John felt safe. 

Like there was more than just him. 

Like he wasn’t alone, but in a good way.

John watches the film, rapt, and then another, and while he does he sinks into better days, and later marvels at the fact that they still mean anything at all.

+

John’s in his room, and Zari’s off-ship working. When she asked him, trying to sound casual, if he’d be okay with her gone, he scoffed and said to give him a little credit. He'd just work on spells in the library or in his room. Or maybe watch a movie. And they'd call if they needed her for a mission. _Go do what you do best, love,_ he said. _Don’t you worry about me._ He gets the nasty feeling that she will, and it makes his stomach twist. 

At least he worries too. Or, well, that’s not actually a good thing, because it turns out that he worries quite a bit. 

She’s going to be all right, just like he will be, he tells himself more than he thought he would. This is the longest she's going to be gone since it happened, nearly a full week, and he’s finding that he’s not sure if she’s as aware as he is of how dangerous things are out there. How fast they can go wrong.

He's pretty sure no one’s aware of it like he is. 

No one’s been off-ship for very long since it happened, actually, other than for missions, and John’s been more than a bit self-absorbed during those. Mick’s been away with Lita at times, but John probably has too much trust in Mick’s ability to get out of things. He's not sure why, if maybe it’s just the child’s logic of Mick being older than him. 

There’s a lot of ways the others could be overpowered, John thinks. After all, he got overpowered. Except, he reminds himself, that was his fault. That was on him for getting caught off-guard and not doing everything he could to stop it. 

But evil things have gotten on the ship before. Gideon’s been disabled before. Plenty of times, actually. 

That's why, John reminds himself, he even warded the ship, just in case, long before this whole thing happened. 

(Sara said _come on, John, you’ve been doing it literally all night for a month, how many wards can there possibly be?_ For Christ’s sake, Sara, a lot, there are a lot.)

Of course, Zari’s not on the ship. It’s probably unreasonable to worry anyway, but Zari doesn’t have the totem with her. She’s got security, he reminds himself, and they’ve gotten background checks and all that, though he’s not sure how much that matters. What if one of them got possessed? 

But Zari’s canny as anything, _she_ does everything possible to stay on top of things, so a problem likely wouldn’t come up in the first place. Besides, John spoke to her just today, and all she is is busy. There’s some kind of surprise product drop she’s been working on for months, ducking in and out of the ship, and this is the culmination. The great coming-together of all those nights spent agonizing over this or that, phone propped on John’s shoulder as she typed away and he drifted off with his head in her lap, and John isn’t going to ruin it by being pathetic.

He’s sure she’d be either annoyed or worried if she realized how much he was obsessing about this, because it’s not like him, but the thing is he’s still doing his best to keep up his streak of not getting anyone hurt. 

If John could just be with the others, at the very least he’d know he’s safe and he’d know they’re safe and he can’t, he can’t be with them because they’re probably sleeping and waking people up just to make sure they’re still there is the kind of thing people do when they’ve lost the plot. 

John’s always been an attention whore—not his words, but definitely the words of many, many others—but not like this. 

“Gideon, is there something on the ship?” 

“Only your teammates are on the ship, Mr. Constantine, barring Ms. Tarazi. Would you like me to call her?”

“What time is it, where she is?”

“Four a.m.”

“Then no, of course I don’t want to bleeding call her, what am I, a teenager? Christ.”

John sits on the floor with his back against the corner of the room and the lights on. He is tired of the shadows. He ought to strengthen the wards he’s put up around the ship. That’ll banish the shadows. He knows they’re not real; it’ll still banish them. Or maybe he’ll just check that everything’s running smoothly. Watch a movie. 

(He wishes he could sleep. Without dreaming, but if it’s necessary to be able to dream, he wishes he could sleep with someone else there in the room. He has Gideon, but she’s not the same. In spite of what he told Behrad about Ravenscar, it’s not really like that for him anymore. He’s more likely to look forward to sleep than anything, but now he realizes that it’s only because that’s when he’s all but guaranteed to have someone else in the room with him, and, obviously, Zari’s not here right now. 

So. All John has is space.

All John has is the growing, gnawing feeling that he’s lost almost everyone, all over again.)

John gets to his feet. Right. He needs to leave.

He realizes that he’s wearing nothing but badly-sized boxers he occasionally uses as sleepers when he actually wears sleepers only when he’s almost out the door, and he needs something else between himself and the rest of the world, so he puts on a white undershirt he never wears. He ought to put on trousers and a shirt like an adult, but right now buttons seem a lot more daunting than usual, and he’s pretty sure he’d look worse if he were in badly-buttoned clothes. Not that anyone’s going to see him.

Not that anyone would speak to him. 

They’d probably give him space. 

The idea makes distress dig into his mind, because what if they’re so busy giving him space that they don’t call him for help when they need it? As much as he screws up, he’s still the strongest sorcerer on the ship, not to mention the only sorcerer on the ship.

(He didn’t mean for it to happen.)

Without Zari here, John finds himself adrift and crushingly alone, which is pathetic, but that’s how John is these days. He used to be so much better at being alone, and now he’s got a list of other people he’d rather share a room with than have to lie down with nothing but his own thoughts, because he made a mistake. 

He joined the Legends, and for a while he was happy, and he fucked it all up like he always does, and now he has to protect them and protect himself when he’s no good at either and when they don’t even want to look at him. 

John clenches his fists. He’s shaking, panting like a dog, and he takes a deep breath and then chokes on it. He should go back to his room, but he doesn’t want to go back to his room, he needs something else, he needs at least _anyone_ there, not just a voice but a body. He could always call someone, but he hates the idea of telling them anything when they already think they understand, so he goes towards the parlour. He’ll watch a movie instead of checking the ship, because the ship is well-lit. Not many shadows.

He’s near the parlour now, and yeah, he will watch a movie. He can be one of those people who falls asleep to the telly, he guesses. That seems like a good plan. That seems like a plan he could’ve made before he was shaking so badly. John stops cold, a wave of nausea overtaking him. Panic rises in his throat like bile.

Or, rather, bile rises in his throat like bile, and he doubles over and vomits on the floor next to the parlour. 

John’s knees give out. He heaves again. He doesn’t remember eating, but at some point he must’ve forced something down. Hm. He would’ve been fine with that one being a mystery for, oh, the rest of his life. 

He thinks he ought to stand up. Run. Hide, even. Just tuck himself away somewhere and catch his breath instead of staying here out in the open, his mind whirling as the danger overtakes him. He should call for help before something happens. He has the time, doesn’t he? But there’s no one here, and John retches again.

“Woah!” someone--Nate--says. “Sara, I found our mystery noises.” Nate sounds anxious, and John groans even as his mind nearly collapses with relief at the familiar voice. Familiar shoes, too, which are all he can see. 

Nate takes a few steps back. Different shoes come into view. 

“John!” Sara says, and John groans again even though he could cry he’s so relieved at not just hearing but being around other human beings, knowing that they’re all right, knowing that there’s more here than him and the shadows, but he doesn’t want anyone to see him like this either. 

The reasonable John, the one with pride who has to get up in the morning and try to face the life he’s stumbled into and swallow all this evening ugliness down, spits out, “Sod off.” 

The unreasonable John, the one who just wants reality to be in his favor again and if that’s not possible at least have someone in the bloody room with him is that really so much to ask, rambles. 

“Sod _off!”_ he says again, banging his fist against the floor. “That’s all you lot have been doing anyway. Give me some _space,_ will you? I’m bloody, bloody _frightened_ of you now, that’s what you think, I can’t, I can’t,” he gasps out. He feels like his chest is caving in. “I can’t do this anymore,” he chokes out. “I can’t be alone like this anymore, it’s driving me mad and what am I supposed to do? What’s anyone supposed to do? I can’t, I’m not a _dog,_ ” John babbles, and at this point he’s sure he’s not making any sense whatsoever. He wheezes. He doesn’t know why he’s so sick. He’s not even drunk. He grabs the collar of his cotton shirt. 

Probably would’ve looked saner in normal clothes, really. Even if the buttons weren’t done up right. 

With a burst of humiliated panic, John tries to stumble to his feet, but instead he ends up on his knees again, and he groans as he manages to get himself into a seated position, his legs sprawled in front of him. 

He looks up. Sara and Nate.

Good. Now he knows they’re safe. Now he knows they’re here with him. That doesn’t make _him_ safe, obviously, but it means more than being alone with—himself. Even when the whole thing at movie night happened, John could swear that he was relieved when he realized, in fits and starts, that he wasn’t by himself, except for—

Nate’s giving him one of those kicked-dog looks, but all John sees when he looks at Nate is, as usual, his teammate. Harmless. John looks back at Sara. 

She kneels down in front of him on one knee, looking very chivalrous compared to Nate, who’s still hovering in the background, and says, hushed, “John, is it okay if I touch you?”

John throws his head back and laughs. “Yes, Sara,” he says, voice bitter and grand. “Touch me. I know you, I know—I even know Nate, hard as it seems to believe, so fucking _touch me,_ it was just, one moment, one bloody moment and everything’s ruined...” Here he struggles to his knees, putting his face near hers, staring intently into her eyes, and says, “It’s that I didn’t know! I didn’t know and I wasn’t ready and I got mixed up!”

John takes a shallow, rasping breath, and before he can say anything else, Sara puts her arms around him. 

John freezes. 

So does Sara, as if she’s worried that she’s traumatized him or something, and he can feel her body falter against his. 

Before she can pull away, he wraps his arms around her and holds on for dear life, burying his face in the crook of her neck. “I don’t want to be alone,” he admits, drunk on exhaustion, nothing left in him but the truth. “Not like this.”

“I’m sorry,” Sara says. “We thought we were doing the right thing, we were just trying to think up a...plan of action.”

“There is no right,” John mutters. “There is no action. It’s all upside fucking down and I don’t know what I want, Sara. I don’t know. I don’t—I didn’t mean for everyone to leave.” 

Sara rubs the back of his head and says, “Okay, John. I won’t, we won’t leave you alone. We can...this’ll get better, okay? Remember what you told me? We’re survivors.”

“Yeah, and then I told you that came at a terrible cost, didn’t I?”

“I’m leaving that part out,” Sara says, and John huffs. Fair enough. Doesn’t exactly fit her agenda. 

“How much more do I really want to survive?” John murmurs into Sara’s shirt, and there’s a long pause before he laughs. “I’m going to regret this in the morning, won’t I?”

“Not in your heart,” Sara sing-songs, and John laughs again, surprised.

“Don't have one,” John says in response, but it’s nothing but wishful thinking, and Sara holds on tighter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 8 - Root Canal  
> Summary: John finally has a few victories. Tragically, communication actually helps. 
> 
> +
> 
> And thank you for the feedback so far, it’s always appreciated and I love to know what you think!
> 
> Also, yeah, when John talks about those "almost shockingly violent Italian films," he's definitely talking about giallo and mondo films.


	8. Root Canal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John finally has a few victories. Tragically, communication actually helps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I posted this chapter later today than I meant to, but I hope you enjoy it! I do.

John is very good at regretting things. It helps that most of his actions are regrettable.

In fact, the first thing he thinks after waking up on the library sofa in half a panic with an awful taste in his mouth and vague memories of the rambling, unhinged monologue that he gave Sara (and Nate) the night before is, _I regret this._

He admitted some things he should’ve repressed and ignored, didn’t he? And when it would’ve been his best course of action too. Repress, ignore, and eventually everything will be back to normal.

Fuck. He has a headache.

John sits on the library couch and scrubs his hand through his hair. He’s pretty sure that today’s the day Zari has her product launch, though it may be tomorrow, he’s not completely sure. He can’t be completely sure of anything. He’s been quite literally all over the place lately. 

He ought to call Zari or something, wish her luck, impress her greatly with the fact that he sort of remembered this thing, though he’ll admit that he hasn’t a clue what the product actually is or anything but the world’s vaguest notion of what a product launch actually entails. Then again, Zari still calls magic “sorcering” half the time, so he thinks they’re even. 

He’s alone in the library, which he doesn’t mind. John still likes being alone sometimes, he thinks. He suspects that it’s knowing that everyone’s trying to leave him alone that worms into his head. Though Sara did say they’d been trying to think up a plan of action while leaving him alone, and John doesn’t even want to know what she meant by that. It sounds painful. 

He’s still dressed in his awful sleepers, though he’s got a blanket tossed over him. He’s going to look like an idiot when he pokes his head out the door. Then again, Sara and Nate probably aren’t here because they’ve been busy telling the others—warning the others—about how he was an idiot last night, so what’s one more humiliation? 

He’d be angry about Sara and Nate inevitably having told the others at least something about their conversation—not to mention for apparently having team meetings about him in the first place—but he’s so exhausted he can’t bring himself to care. He’s even relieved that he’s not going to have to tell the story himself. (Besides, it’s not like he hasn’t been a not-really-unconcerned party in emergency team meetings about various teammates before.)

It’s strange, though. John’s always been a fast-talker, a sweet-talker, a talker of all kinds, and it feels strange to keep messing it up now. He should be talking the others into thinking he’s fine, but instead he swallows his words and rambles and stumbles and stammers and tells the truth without a believable spin because he isn’t always sure of the truth. He used to be, even when it wasn’t actually true. 

John’s nails scrape down his face, not digging in too hard, and the sting brings him back to the Waverider. He takes deep breaths, putting his forearms on his bent knees. Curled up again, damn it. He closes his eyes and imagines himself, there. Back against the wall, curled up, arms shielding his face, the demon looming over him, grabbing him, but he has enough time for an incantation and he saves himself and…

That’s not at all what happened. John’s breaths shake. 

He puts his forehead on his knees because, all of a sudden, he feels heavy. He wants to go to sleep again. He doesn’t think he dreamt so much last night, like how he dreams less when he’s with Zari. Dreams less, almost like he fantasized about in Ravenscar. 

That was nice. 

John blinks himself back to earth and shivers. He needs his clothes. He’s cold, he’s always gotten cold easily, though he’s also always been good at ignoring it, and he feels worse than naked with these rags on besides. 

The door to the library slides open. _Woosh._ John’s breath _wooshes_ along.

“John?” Sara asks. 

“I don’t have my clothes,” John mutters. “I look like a complete knob.”

“Only a little,” Sara says. “I can get you some.”

John nods and must drift off for a bit, because it feels like only a second has passed before Sara gets back and tosses a shirt, trousers, and one of his coats at him. 

“No tie,” he says critically, unfolding. He strips himself of his sweat-soaked undershirt and shrugs on his shirt, doing up the buttons with clumsy fingers and then directing Sara to turn around while he puts on his trousers. 

He sighs heavily once he’s done, and says, “How do I look?”

Sara turns around. “Literally exactly the same as always,” she assures. 

John’s lips twitch upwards in a smile. “Thanks. Even if you’re lying to make me feel better.”

“Did it work?”

John gives her a listless shrug, and Sara’s pointed light-heartedness fades into tired sadness, like she can’t help it. John understands. Not being able to help things is something John has always understood, at least. 

Having been able to help things and failing—he understands that even better. 

John looks away. He straightens the cuffs of his shirt. He sits on the couch and feels numb. He didn’t feel numb then, or even right after. That started later. There’s another thing John’s familiar with, at least. Numbness. Comfortably numb. That song used to play on the radio station he insisted Gaz put on all the time. _Time for seventies throwbacks,_ the DJ would say, and John would sing along with gusto, and everyone would laugh because of course John liked that song. Drama queen. 

John covers himself with the numbness like a child pulling a blanket over his head, and to himself he murmurs, “What now?” 

“Do you want to go eat?” Sara asks, and the word _want_ makes a sharp thrill run through him, and he doesn’t know why.

“No,” he says, because he feels like he’s going to be sick again, and a little drugged. At least it’s better than feeling anything else. Probably. 

He lies down.

John could do with being alone now. He’s found that what he really wants—at least at this exact moment, in this exact situation—is for someone to be there if he needs them, and for them to need him too, for good measure. But they probably think he’s useless now, pitiable. 

“I’m exhausted,” he mutters. 

“We should talk about this,” Sara says, and John covers his face with his arm. “Fine, not right now, but...I’m sorry, we’re just still trying to figure out how to handle this, and the best way to do that and the best thing for both you and the team will be for you to be part of it again.” The words get more reluctant as Sara says them. _Bit insensitive,_ John notes, but it doesn’t really hurt him, because he suspects that Sara’s floundering enough that she’s fallen back on brutally practical phrases she’s heard Ava say, and that means she’s out of her depth in a way that he finds unkindly amusing. Besides, it’s not like he himself is a sensitive soul. Besides, it’s not like he isn’t able to brush all that off.

(Besides, it’s not like she isn’t right. But John doesn’t want to deal with the pity. He doesn’t want the others to deal with his being a burden, because he suspects they’ve already got a foot out the metaphorical door. All the evidence points to the opposite, but John has been wrong many, many times.)

And really, none of that matters, because in the end, “You lot don’t have to do anything.”

When he mumbles out the words, he turns his head to contemplate the ceiling again, and yet in his mind’s eye he still sees Sara’s I’m-so-over-this-guy’s-shit look plain on her face when she says, “John. I don’t think that’s true.” 

“Get me back into fighting shape,” John says in response, still mumbling, almost whispering. 

There’s a pause so long that John thinks Sara’s decided to give up on the conversation and get up the energy to leave, and even though John wanted to be alone a few minutes ago, the thought still makes his chest constrict. He still doesn’t say, _stay._ There are a lot of things he’s not saying. The calcifying ball of useless emotions in his chest and the frustration burning his throat like bleach speak to that. 

And then Sara says something, and John feels a dizzy mix of relief and regret.

“I’m pretty sure I thought this was less complicated than it is,” Sara admits. “I mean, I didn’t think it wasn't a big deal or anything, but sometimes I somehow still forget how fucking _messy_ trauma can be, and—”

“Bugger off with that word,” John snaps, feeling a jolt of unease. “I’m not that kind of person.” 

_(You’ve already been through so much, and you got out of it all right, didn’t you? This should be easy.)_

“Okay,” Sara says, voice calculated to be soothing and firm. “It’s just—”

_(This should be easier.)_

But John doesn’t want to hear it, and he says, “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

He can hear Sara start to protest, and annoyance starts to burn in his chest, but then he has to swallow it down when she says, “Okay. That’s fine.” 

Well. She’s making a concession. That’s something. 

Except.

“I’m not worth all this fuss,” he tells the ceiling, and there is a note of sad resignation to his voice, and he hates it—not the resignation, but the sadness.

“Whatever you think,” Sara says in response, because she must assume that, since he spoke again, he does want to talk after all, “we’re still here for you. We’ll figure it out.” 

“I don’t know what I want,” John says, and the thought upsets him, because he swears he used to at least have an idea of it. A big picture kind of want, lost as he felt. He knew that when he found his way he wanted to no longer be damned, and to be satisfied being alone. 

Now he only has one of those things. 

Bereft of the big picture, he grasps at something smaller. “I don’t want to talk anymore,” he says again. 

“Okay,” Sara says, also again. With hesitation in her voice, she tells him, “I’ll...go.”

And John, confirming, to his frustration, that he’s not up to talking anymore, finds that he doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t know how to say, _don’t._ He doesn’t want to talk, but— _I didn’t mean for everyone to leave._ He blinks rapidly at the ceiling, and Sara, probably more perceptive than he gives her credit for, pauses when she’s almost at the door, and then turns around.

“Wait, John. Do you want me to go?” 

John gives the ceiling a bitter smile. He says, “No.”

He’s not sure if he’s surprised when she stays, keeping him company as he does absolutely nothing. She leafs through books, and John feels like he’s holding her hostage, and it’s not fair. To her, it’s not fair to her.

“I should get some food,” he grinds out, sitting up, because he has to leave this place someday and the ache in his stomach is probably hunger, and Sara brightens. 

“Let’s go,” she says, and John follows her as she leaves the room.

“You told, didn’t you?” John says while they make their way to the galley, slightly childish accusation in his voice, because the others might as well know, who gives a fuck, maybe clearing things up is actually good, but he still doesn’t like that it’ll make it even harder to show them he’s all right. 

(Hey, there's another thing he can understand: trying to delude himself and others about this or that with a religious fervor he hopes will soon work on at least them.) 

“Told what?” 

John rolls his eyes. “Last night. The whole thing.” 

“...A little,” Sara admits after a brief pause. “Just to tell them we have to—” She clears her throat. “That you got really...upset last night because the whole giving you space thing backfired.” 

John sighs, and pushes down the resentment of the fact that there’s anything for his teammates _know_ and _handle_ in the first place, the disgust he feels at the fact that he got upset at all even though he’s all right, he’s all right, he has to be all right. 

Besides, there’s a practical matter that’s more important. “But you haven’t told Zari, right?” he asks, his hands deep in his pockets and his eyes fixed on the floor. 

“No.”

“Good. She’s doing her product launch. Wouldn’t want to interrupt it with my nonsense.” He shakes his head. “Don’t want to bother her when it’s nothing, really.”

“Didn’t seem like nothing last night,” Sara points out, and John shrugs. 

He pauses in walking abruptly enough that Sara bumps into him. “I felt something coming for us last night,” he starts, but then his words die in his throat, and instead of making himself seem mad, he mutters, “I was sick last night. That’s all.” 

“Right,” Sara says, apparently deciding to cut her losses. “Right, yeah.” Sara raises her hand to clap him on the shoulder and then stops, apparently starting to think better of it, and John stands still, trying to make his body loose, inviting, and holds his breath. Her hand lingers in the air for a moment, and then she decides to clap him on the shoulder after all, once, twice. 

It’s quick, and Sara’s hand slips off his shoulder as they start towards the galley again. Still, even though it was just an awkward pat, John feels like maybe there’s been a victory here. 

He feels less victorious when he walks into the galley and sees all of the others, because apparently they don’t spend time anywhere else. Or maybe they’ve been waiting for him somehow, but that could be paranoia talking.

Whatever it is, there’s an awkward silence between all of them, Nate and Behrad and Mick and Ava and now Sara and John. The air is supposed to be cleared between them now, he thinks, but it doesn’t feel that way. Of course it doesn’t, because he still can’t figure out what he wants from this. From them.

He wants them to not immediately leave the room when he comes in, as if they don’t want to look at him.

Like Newcastle all fucking over again, even though no one got hurt this time except him.

“Okay,” Sara announces, sounding a little exasperated, and John gives her a disturbed look. “Maybe we should talk.”

“I told you ten minutes ago that I didn’t want to talk,” John says, though actually he’s beginning to think that maybe the air isn’t so clear because he has a bone to pick. He’s starting to choke on words he’s not sure he wants to say, and he’s getting tired of choking.

Sara grimaces and, tentatively, asks, “Well...do you think maybe you could just...tell them what you told me last night?”

“Oh, right,” John says, his mood darkening. His mouth starts to run and he gives up and lets it. He puts on an obnoxiously BBC accent and says, “John, you were very forthcoming in the last group session. Do you think you could expand on that?” 

There’s a resounding silence, and John grins. Back to his normal accent, he says, “Fine. I got sick and I told Sara I didn’t mean for everyone to leave, and I haven’t quite—I haven’t quite _expanded_ on that. Thing is, thing is—no one got hurt. I didn’t hurt anyone. I don’t have blood on my hands, y’know? Not this time. For once, I don’t have blood on my hands,” John stresses, and he thinks of the literal blood on his hands the other day and banishes the thought as the silence drags on. 

John realizes, then, that he’s caught them all, including Sara and Nate, off-guard, which makes sense, because he’s caught himself off-guard too, but sometimes things come into his head and lately it’s so hard to hold all of the words he shouldn’t say when he’s also holding the things he can’t say at all, and he hesitates, clenching his jaw. He considers leaving, but then Mick speaks.

“What are you talking about, Trench Coat?” Mick asks, because he’s at least direct, and John rolls his eyes as if by muscle memory. 

“No one can ever keep up,” he mutters. “I’m saying it’s not—” He huffs and decides to finally just ask, or, perhaps, accuse, because it doesn’t matter what Sara said, she’s not the only person on this ship who feels. He needs to know about the others, _clear the air_. Needs to know if this is as bad as he’s suspected after all, if at this point they really are going to say something he doesn’t want to hear because he’s right, he’s always right, the things he doesn’t want to hear, the resentment, the disgust, the hate, those are the most important things. 

And then, because he’s older and wiser now and knows that sometimes it’s not as bad as all that, he wants to know if he’s spiraling, ugly thoughts coming into his head so quickly he can’t do anything but spit them out. “The space, I need to—were you, are you lot trying to be sensitive or d’you want an excuse to not be around me after I fucked up? D’you want an excuse to give up? Because I know I’ve given you plenty, even before this I’ve given you plenty and it’s not like you have to stick around just ‘cause you were told to, I—” 

He’s not sure what else he’s planning to say, if he’s going to spout some more deep insecurities that he’s been trying to tell himself he’s not feeling, but thankfully he doesn’t have to find out.

“Shut up,” Mick says, and John, thrown off and more than a little affronted, shuts up. “You’re being an idiot.”

“Mick!” Nate hisses, and Mick shrugs.

“He’s being an idiot,” he says flatly.

John snorts. “You’re one to talk.” 

“We don’t hate you.”

John narrows his eyes, but he’s starting to feel less like everything is a disaster and more like he’s having a real conversation that’s hitting familiar beats, in spite of the strange subject, and everyone’s still here, and maybe John was spiraling. (Also, bloody hell, but maybe he _is_ an attention whore.) “Actually, you’ve pretty consistently hated me since I got on the ship.”

“Because you’re annoying, not because of this.” A brief silence. “And I don’t hate you,” Mick says grudgingly. 

John falters. He’s pretty sure that that’s not the kind of thing Mick would tell him under other circumstances, but he can’t bring himself to be angry, because at least it’s true. He knows Mick doesn’t hate him, never mind all the times he’s said the words. It would be an exaggeration to say he and Mick talk often, but they drink together, play cards together, and both have a predilection for fire that every single one of their teammates has at different points called “disturbing.” So. No, they don’t hate each other. 

The words still throw John off. (Maybe the strangest part is how much he cares that the words were said at all, how relieved he is; it’s like his whole life is now a mix of tension and relief and the things he’s crushed inside of him that he’ll have to hold forever.) 

There's quiet all around, and he thinks that the others are waiting for him to speak, and he feels a pang of embarrassment when he realizes he has nothing to say. 

He’s starting to feel nauseous again. He wishes he had a quick comeback, but his head feels empty and so he nods. 

“Sure,” he mutters, and, for lack of anything better to do, he opens the fridge and grabs something, anything. He’s confronted with what he’s almost sure is a bottle of ketchup, though it has no label. He wonders why they have a glass bottle of ketchup anyway. Maybe someone asked Gideon to make it, probably for a stupid reason. No, there’s a price tag stuck on the bottom, so someone either stole it or bought it, definitely for a stupid reason. 

It cost fifty cents, apparently. John doesn’t know what time period it might’ve been where a bottle of ketchup cost fifty cents, and he wonders if maybe it’s not ketchup after all, and he feels a spark of curiosity through the dull unease that’s started in him, mood swinger that he is. 

He screws the top off the bottle, pours some into his palm, and licks it off. Then he makes a face, because, yeah, it’s ketchup, and he’s never particularly liked ketchup, especially on its own. 

He wipes his hand on his trousers and then screws the top onto the bottle and puts it back in the fridge. 

When he turns back, everyone is unashamedly staring at him, and he pretends that it’s the ketchup that’s confused them because maybe it is this time.

It’s nice to have people not know what to do with him for reasons other than. That.

“John,” Nate says, “no offense, but...what the fuck?”

John raises his eyebrows. “ _What_ the fuck?” he asks. “It didn’t have a label, what was I supposed to do?”

Nate frowns. “I’m not sure.”

“Seriously?” Ava asks, and John tries to shoot her a confident smile, but it feels twitchy and tentative and he thinks it probably looks it too, and he lets it drop as Ava smiles back. She visibly softened when he looked at her, and John doesn’t know if he likes that. He looks away. 

“Surprise me, Gideon,” he says, and she makes him fish and chips. He wonders if he should be offended that she probably thinks that that’s comfort food for him or something, but then he doesn’t particularly care.

John wanders over to the table everyone else is occupying and, with his teammates in his line of sight, picks at his food. There are no shadows but the ones the others cast, and he can live with those. He puts his elbow on the table and props his head up on his hand. He’s starting to feel drowsy. Mostly dreamless sleep or not, last night wasn’t exactly peaceful and uninterrupted for him, and it turns out that he’s not just exhausted in an all-encompassing sense. 

The others are talking, and he can’t really tell if there’s forced cheeriness in their voices or not, but he assumes there is. It’s somehow still enough for his eyes to droop, and he finds himself with his head on the table, cushioned by his arm.

“Should we...wake him up?” Behrad asks, probably louder than he intended and though John is not quite asleep yet. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Mick says, and that, apparently, is that, or maybe not, but if there’s more conversation, John doesn’t hear it. 

He wakes up minutes to hours later, and turns his head a little to look at a pair of huge combat boots that are resting next to him. “Ugh,” he mutters, wrinkling his nose against the smell of body odor and soil. “On the table?”

He knows that that’s rich coming from him, considering the things he has (and that occasionally he and Zari have) done on this table, including putting his feet on it, but he’s made a habit of complaining about Mick Rory like Mick’s made a habit of complaining about him, and of course Mick puts his feet on the table even when they end up inches away from someone else’s head. And when there are multiple empty tables in the galley anyway besides. Mick could’ve chosen any one of those. John shouldn’t be glad he didn’t.

As John sits up, he shoves Mick’s feet off of the table like Ava does with him, knowing that he’s risking his continued intactness by doing so and, for a moment, not caring, until Mick, who appears to be reading, of all things, grunts unhappily and half rises out of his seat, and John immediately and unexpectedly cares very much. 

Mick Rory has a talent for looming, and if John’s going to speak of people with frames like the demon’s puppet, which he isn’t, but he’ll think of it, though not willingly, well...Mick’s actually got one over Nate. Even though John doesn’t at all think Mick would take that particular page out of the demon’s book—he’s correctly clocked Rory as one of those lovely hypocrites who’d do anything for a job (but won’t do _that_ )—he flinches back, because his life is a joke. 

Mick grimaces, disgust flickering over his face so quickly that John has to consider that he might’ve imagined it, and makes an obviously calculated decision to stop it with the looming and take a step back. “Watch it, Trench Coat,” he grunts, going over to the fridge and grabbing a beer. 

Glumly, John considers the possibility that it may be a while before he and Mick can go toe to toe again in the literal sense. Seems like the rush of arguing and the odd overall-harmless physical altercation isn’t such a rush anymore.

Mick holds up a second beer, and John shrugs. “Would prefer something stronger,” he mumbles, and Mick puts the beer down in front of him. 

“You haven’t eaten shit, you’ll get sick,” Mick says gruffly, jerking his head over to the mostly-unfinished fish and chips, and John rolls his eyes.

“Hypocrite,” he says under his breath, because if there’s anyone on this ship who’s tied with John for borderline-alcoholism, it’s Mick. “Y’know, you’ve become desperately uncool in the last few months,” he tells Mick, morbidly curious as to whether he can get him worked up enough to loom again. Maybe John’s earlier reaction was just a one-off, like how he reacted to Nate touching him. Or a...two-off, he guesses, given what happened when Mick came up behind him that one time, though at least no one knows about that but John. 

“Wonder if it’s fatherhood that’s done it to you,” John muses. Mick, who’s leaning against the counter now, gives him a flat look, and John shrugs, admitting to them both that he wasn’t brave enough to give the joke enough teeth to actually work Mick up. “Though it’s not like being a dad always makes a man softer,” he mutters, and Mick snorts. He’ll give him that. 

John takes a swig of his beer. “How long was I out?” he asks. 

Mick shrugs. “Two hundred pages.”

“Thanks, that helps,” John responds, and Mick shrugs again. 

John doesn’t mention that he actually slept well for the first time since Zari left, crick in his neck notwithstanding. He just finishes the beer and heads out, muttering, almost under his breath, “Thanks, mate.”

Right after he says that, he hopes Mick didn’t hear him.

He did, but John decides to take his “don’t mention it, Trench Coat” to heart. 

In spite of John’s ever-encroaching dark thoughts, he actually feels all right. He’s sure of it because it’s so different from how he’s been feeling lately. The others have been, if not normal, not as abnormal as they could be, and John heads over to the library, hoping for something he doesn’t want to hope for, and finds it. Or finds Nate, rather, reading a book on the sofa.

Nate looks up. He seems a little reluctant, but he raises his eyebrows, and John shrugs. _Yes, it’s fine. You’re fine._ He doesn’t say any of that because he doesn’t want to, but Nate seems to mostly understand, definitely having extrapolated more about John’s feelings than John’s comfortable with from last night’s disaster.

Or maybe it wasn’t that much of a disaster. Vomiting his feelings out—somewhat literally--isn’t the same as the things he wishes he could do but can’t, but it seems to have done something. Maybe this is a turning point, because today was something bordering on “fine.”

At least it’s not Newcastle. At least they still care. At least he was able to speak to the others, and even able to speak to them without feeling broken. At least he got some sleep. Who knows, maybe that “plan of action” the others were making up is working. Maybe they’re all just getting used to things.

Just seconds after John considers today’s relative okayness, he feels a hot wave of anger rise through his body and the ball of rage made of the memories and emotions he’s crushed in his chest expand, because today wasn't good, it was necessary; he can admit that to himself and only to himself. 

Today was a net fucking positive and, actually, sure, whatever, he'll say it was good, but only if he can point out that that’s only compared to the days he’s been having lately, which have been more like intense psychological torture than living. 

Today was victory after victory in rebuilding, in rehabilitating, in clearing the bleeding air, and it was about as pleasant as a root canal: sure, there’s at least local anesthetic, and your tooth feels better once it’s over, but it’s not exactly buckets of fun. 

John wants things to be different with a desperation he can’t entertain, because it doesn’t matter what he wants, does it? Because—no. He’s done with this. 

He shoves his thoughts away, scrambling to find anything else to dwell on, and thinks, right, Zari’ll be home soon, that’s nice.

He can’t wait to not tell her a single thing about what happened while she was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally had a different chapter title, but you don't know how much time I spent on that dumb root canal joke. (A lot of time.)
> 
> \---
> 
> I really appreciate everyone who's following this story and leaving kudos or comments (!) or just reading. 
> 
> Anyway, if you have the time and feel like it, please do drop a comment and tell me what you think. :) 
> 
> \---
> 
> Chapter 9 - Here's How It Happened (Redux)  
> Summary: Sometimes, at the end of your rope, there's dynamite.


	9. Here's How It Happened (Redux)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes, at the end of your rope, there's dynamite.

It’s night-time, and Zari lies next to him with her arm thrown over his chest and says, “You seem better.”

John half-smiles up at the ceiling, detached. It’s been just over a full week since that necessary day, and he's all right now. What happened is all he thinks about, but only because it’s over, and it’s not like he’s feeling it. Everything in his mind has gone into his heart and he doesn’t need it anymore. “I am. I’m trying that, what do you call it? Radical acceptance bit of yours, and it’s working wonders.”

Zari huffs out a laugh. She kisses John’s shoulder, and, against his skin, whispers, “I hope so.”

The end.

+

Now that reality has been put to rights and he seems better, John doesn’t feel entirely present. 

The others begin to look at him with worry again, unless they never stopped in the first place, which is likely. 

He’s not sure whether to smile or not. He can’t remember how much he smiled before all this, and it’ll look strange if he does it too much.

There’s that drugged feeling, that numbness. 

His chest gets heavier with all the memories and emotions and things he can’t say that he’s pushed down and crushed and left there to rot. 

His head gets lighter. 

Zari says he seems distant, and he pretends that he doesn’t feel annoyed at how quickly she’s changed her tune. 

He kisses her but doesn’t try to go further because he doesn’t want to know what might be too far for him.

+

It happened. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

He feels sick.

This might not last forever; he is not sure if he wants it to.

He’d like to be himself again.

+

In his dreams he’s in a laundry room. During the day there’s something behind him. He flinches sometimes, but it doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t turn his back to anyone. He closes his eyes and he sees terrible things. It’s over now. The air has been cleared. Move on. Get over it. 

John doesn’t feel anything because all the shit feelings, all the real feelings, all the thoughts he doesn’t want to have, he’s gotten so good at pushing them down that he doesn’t even have to try. They’re all added to the rotting heaviness in his chest, which is starting to grow enough that it’s crushing his lungs. 

Everything rushes together. John feels dizzy with the memories he doesn’t have to deal with because acceptance means that they don’t matter anymore. 

He steps carefully because he doesn’t want to fall.

If he falls, he might hit his head, and that would just be rich. 

+

Here’s how it happened.

John got caught off-guard when he’d barely begun a routine exorcism...stupid of him...almost a disaster...was a disaster...didn’t think to call for back-up...everything went wrong...he did everything wrong...got caught off-guard and that was on him...if anyone asks, he wasn’t afraid…he’s not afraid...something terrible happened because of him, again, but at least it only happened to him, and he did that, he did that...terrible things happen to John, that’s just how it is, and it always bounces back to him, that’s just how it is too...didn’t know something could make him feel...it’s not so bad...he’s got his life, he’s still got his life and it’s fine, he appreciates it, everything is all right now and he ruined it…

Here’s how it happened, and there’s no one to tell John different, because this time it’s true. Look at him, all grown up and facing reality, the horrible things he drags into his life. 

He’s got more than he deserves. He’ll live. He always lives. He’s not there anymore. 

He didn’t mean for everyone to leave, and they didn’t, and maybe he will keep them. 

Here’s how it happened.

His magic failed him. He failed. He screwed up. 

But it’s over now. 

At least John’s honest. At least John can tell himself the awful truth and realize it’s not as bad as all that. 

He is guilty as charged, as always, but it’s done. He can get over it how he’s gotten over everything else. 

He can stop going back.

It can stop hurting.

It didn’t have to happen, but it did, because he let it.

He can accept that. 

+

It doesn’t take long to fall again. 

Reality always catches up, and his head can’t just be empty forever, and all the things he’s pushed down and crushed don’t seem to be going away. John’s starting to get scared that he’s built a bomb inside of himself by accident. 

He paces across the parlour. He had a dream in the middle of the day; typical. The floor feels too solid under his feet. The numbness is fading and it was going to happen and John is alone, and John has to keep being alone until this is done. He’s breathing too fast. He’s shaking. He doesn’t get like this anymore.

He needs to accept reality. 

That’s what he’s been doing to calm himself down. That’s what he did to calm himself down, a week and a few days ago, and it worked great except now that he’s pacing and shaking without even remembering why, he’s realizing that he’s just gotten more and more distant from everything and that wasn’t the point, actually, but he kept having good days and the good days just meant he wasn’t losing his mind every three minutes and he wanted the good days to be better already and he’s trying, he’s trying, and—

“John? Are you okay?”

John gives Ava a sideways look and feels a spark of mortification. He shrugs. He speaks. 

Words don’t feel like enough, but they’re all he’s got. 

“It happened,” John says. “It happened. It’s over. I’m here. It’s over, I don’t—feel that way.”

“Have you been having flashbacks?” Ava asks, taking a tentative step into the parlour, and John hesitates.

No, he hasn’t. It’s not flashbacks to think about it, or dream about it. He’s been keeping his back against the wall. 

John shakes his head. “I don’t do that anymore.” 

“It’s not really something you do,” Ava says.

_It’s something that happens._

Yeah, but things don’t just happen. John makes things happen, that’s how it works. 

John shakes his head. “I’m not doing it anymore.” 

He’s being careful.

Zari said he couldn’t just hide away from the world. 

He had to face it, so he did, and now it’s over, and fuck, but he hates himself, he hates himself. He mutters, “I didn’t even call for back-up.”

He’s going to say something else, probably, but his reluctant audience says something first.

“Seriously, John, why are you so obsessed with that?” Ava asks, exasperation in her voice, and John pauses in his pacing so abruptly that he almost stumbles. Trust Ava to be blunt about it. John is almost relieved, though he’s also pretty unsure of what she’s talking about, scattered as he is right now, even as his pieces come back together. 

“Obsessed with what?”

“Back-up. You’ve brought it up before. How you didn’t call for back-up.”

“Have I?” John asks, which is a stupid answer. His voice is dry.

Ava, her arms crossed, nods. “When you were...at movie night. John, why is it so important to you?” Ava grimaces. “Was that the wrong thing to say?” 

John doesn’t answer the question. He crosses his arms too. “I dunno,” he mutters, even though he might. He doesn’t want to. 

It’s easy to not want things. It’s easy for those things to happen anyway. 

The silence becomes charged, and John sighs, and damn it all, his feet are on the floor and a piece of some greater, silent truth uncurls from his chest and climbs up his throat. 

“I wanted to reach for my comm,” he admits. “But then my coat was off and there the comm went, and my equipment was scattered and it was hard to focus because I’d been slammed into a bloody wall and he was grabbing me and when he pushed me down my head hit the floor and that was _after_ hitting the wall and...” John takes a shaky breath. He sits down heavily on one of the armchairs and tries to ignore Ava’s awkward hovering. “I didn’t find the time.” He clenches and unclenches his fists. 

“Maybe if I’d been wearing the comm,” he starts, grasping onto something that was his mistake, though when he does exorcisms on his own or sometimes with Gary he doesn’t wear his comm, and of course it wasn’t turned on, that’d be an S.O.S. type of thing in that situation, and when an S.O.S. type thing actually happened he _did_ think of turning it on, he just said that, and besides, he’s not sure if it would’ve stayed in his ear if he’d actually had it in in the first place, so maybe it made more sense to have it in his coat even though it didn’t matter in the end and, and, and, “Maybe if I’d been wearing the comm,” he says again. “I could’ve gotten the upper hand before it was too late, or someone could’ve, or maybe I didn’t think of you lot after all, what do I know, really, I’d been drinking—”

His breaths start to get shallow again, and that’s when Ava sits down in the armchair across from the one he’s in.

She says, “John, even if you’d been drunk out of your mind and gone, like, fuck the Legends, I can do it myself, or actually _didn’t_ even consider our existence until it was over, it wouldn’t be your fault.” John flinches. He never said that. He wasn’t talking about that. That part is nothing but true. He says nothing. Ava lets out a frustrated breath and points out, “And those aren’t even the facts.” 

“There are no facts here,” John says automatically. 

“There are always facts,” Ava responds. “And...sometimes it makes me feel better. To look at them.”

“So you think it’ll make me feel better too? Talking about the facts?”

“Maybe?” Ava says. “If you...want to talk about it?” 

“Not really,” John says, “but I’m going to.” He might as well. He feels distant, still, but he’s coming back, and he lets his body do what it wants. This is going somewhere he was going to have to go eventually. 

“I don’t want you to feel forced,” Ava says, which is rich, considering how forced her words feel. She is desperately out of her depth, and, as always when these things happen, there is a mean, petty part of John that’s delighted by it. Let her be out of her depth. Let the things he doesn’t want to say be things she doesn’t want to hear. That way they’ll be even.

John thinks:

Fuck acceptance. 

He’s going to state the facts. 

John waves her off and says, “All right, Ava. Here are the facts. I would’ve called. I think. Just ‘cause it would’ve been easier and why not make it easier, yeah? If I’m going to have other people, I might as well use them, but I couldn’t find the time, see?” John shakes his head. “And he had me and I gave up because...I’m not one to be able to take on someone with brute force if they get me by surprise, but if there’s one thing I can do, it’s take a hit until I don’t have to anymore.” 

“Pretending you’re not going to fight back so that the assailant lets down their guard is a completely legitimate strategy, John. It’s a last resort, but sometimes last resorts are necessary when you get caught off-guard.”

_When you let yourself get caught off-guard._

John scrubs his hand through his hair and says. “I know. I’m a man of last resorts, of course I know. But I shouldn’t have had to go there. I shouldn’t have had to make that choice, I shouldn’t have let myself get caught off-guard. It’s all excuses, it’s all John Constantine trying to dodge responsibility again, it’s—”

“Not!” Ava finally says, too loud. “I'm sorry, I don’t understand why you’re trying so hard to make it your fault. Is it a self-flagellation thing? So many things are your fault that when something’s not, you still want it to be?” 

John feels like he’s—

Been kicked in the solar plexus. Slammed into a wall. Hit his head hard enough to draw blood. 

And it’s taking him a minute to get to his feet, because...

“I’m not trying to make it my fault,” John says, even though he is, mostly, but there’s a part two he hasn’t said and, “I’m trying to make it my choice.” 

“But it wasn’t,” Ava says. “It just...wasn’t. It wasn’t your choice and it wasn’t your fault and there’s nothing you can do about it!” The words come in a burst, and John doesn’t know how to respond.

He used to be quick with a comeback. This time, his only comeback is to walk away. She tries to apologize, but he doesn’t want to hear it, because she might be right, and John hates it. He hates the truth, hates reality, hates lying even more, sometimes. 

No one on this ship thinks he’s fine and dandy.

Why is he pretending? 

It’s because he doesn’t want to face the truth, of course. He never does, not when it hurts, but it already hurts, because this happened and he let it and that’s the truth, right? He’s accepted it, the facts, except—

 _It was bad luck, John._

Yeah, well, fuck that. Fuck everything that’s happened to him. Fuck everything about how he feels. 

Fuck everything that’s better now and everything that got worse. 

In the end, it’s his fault. In the end it all boils down to cosmic justice. He’s been rotten since the day he was born. 

Is he lying to himself? He can’t tell. He knows what the others would say, and...what if they’re right? What if they are, without a doubt, right? 

John goes to his room. Shuts himself in there for a while. When Gideon asks, he says he doesn’t want to talk to anyone. He’s numb again. The bomb in his chest ticks on. 

After what feels like a long time staring at the ceiling, John finds that he is angry. At himself. At the bloody demon. At letting this happen. At not letting it happen. 

At not being able to stop it because he didn’t have the chance. 

That rage in his chest—the despair, the fear, the memories—is expanding. Bomb or not, he thinks it might explode.

He gets out of bed and, mechanically, dresses himself for the day before realizing that it’s the middle of the night. He stumbles over to his desk and picks up a shot glass, and then he sees that his bottle of whiskey is empty. He thinks of the resounding silence that follows him around in spite of the endless talking. 

“It’s your fault,” he says. “It’s all your fault.” Even the things that aren’t. “You made a choice to be like this.” Because otherwise he hasn’t had near as many choices as he thinks. “You deserve this,” he says. His voice sounds hollow, like he’s trying to convince himself.

Why would he be trying to convince himself of all that? Is he really so damaged? What the hell is it that he’s been accepting anyway? 

He feels like he’s been stagnating for months, grasping onto the same details, unable to register any of it no matter what he thinks or says or what anyone else says. Radical acceptance, right. More like the exact opposite. 

It happened. That part is true.

Everything else? 

Well.

Let’s see.

John laughs, because John laughs like other people cry, without meaning to or wanting to, and he’s having such funny thoughts. 

He laughs, and to the room in general he says, “Face it, Johnny.” 

He looks at the shot glass in his hand.

Then he shrugs, and throws it to the floor.

He relishes the sound it makes as it shatters, and he laughs again.

He takes the lamp on the desk, which is unplugged anyway because he doesn’t need bloody lamps, and smashes it against the wall, caving in the lampshade. He tosses the lamp carcass to the floor and doesn’t laugh again because he hasn’t stopped laughing yet. 

He feels like he’s choking, and he covers his face with his hands and then drags them down until he reaches the place where thick fingers—and they weren’t the only thick part of the demon’s puppet, ha!—should be and he doesn’t drag them off because of course they’re not there. John digs his fingernails into his cheekbones and pulls and keeps pulling, not particularly deep, and there’s nothing there. 

The only thing gagging him these days is himself. The only thing hurting him these days is himself, because he can’t move on, because in spite of all the _healing,_ all the _better moments,_ it still comes back. John tells himself he’s over it, but it means nothing, because John tells himself things all the time, and it doesn’t make them true, and he doesn’t actually want to live the rest of his life disconnected. 

When the bomb in John’s chest explodes, it releases a cocktail of rage and grief and memory so horrible it circles back around to being euphoric, and his laughter turns into more of a scream as he swings on his heel to swipe off all the other nonsense on his desk with a grand flourish of his arm. 

Everything he’s pushed down and crushed isn't pushed down or crushed anymore, and John lets it escape; all the conflicting thoughts and emotions and experiences he hasn’t let himself access since it happened and he immediately began trying to edit his own delusions to make them more bearable. 

“Can’t you feel it? Can’t you feel yourself moving? Can’t you feel this place? You know you’re not there anymore! Get a _fucking_ grip!” he tells his useless frightened self, and the desk chair becomes one with the desk, and now John is screaming wordlessly. 

He must seem completely insane. They would’ve restrained him by now in Ravenscar. They’d be getting the needle ready to sedate him, but he’s not in Ravenscar. He’s not restrained. He’s not sedated. He’s screaming, and he’s not done yet.

He’s screaming because he’s tired of the words that have made up so much of the locked-away things inside of him, words that won’t come out and words that come out bitter and twisted and ugly and words he doesn’t want to speak at all and he’s sick of the endless repetition and so he shall bypass the words entirely, mangle and dispose of all the things he couldn’t say then and that are useless now. 

_I need some back-up. I need some help here. I need some help here I need some help here I need some bloody help here I’m suffocating I’m speechless I’m going to die I don’t want to die how is this happening to me it’s not supposed to be like this it wasn’t supposed to go like this why is this happening get off me you bastard it’s not supposed to be like this—_

He screams as loud as he can because it hurt and John’s not opposed to screaming in pain; only when he tried to scream then there was nothing satisfying about it, with the hand over his face and everything so muffled. His mouth was practically forced closed. He still probably could’ve done something, could’ve figured out some way to save himself before it went so far, like he always has before, _if._

 _If_ he hadn’t hit his head, _if_ he hadn’t been stunned, _if_ he hadn’t fucked up so spectacularly in the first place. He couldn’t scream, he couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move, so he went quiet.

John is done being quiet and he is tired of being there and he doesn’t want to be there anymore, he wants this to be over, he wants the ups and downs to level out, wants the bad days to end and the good days to be less shit and he wants to exist again like normal. 

He wants all of it to go away, because he is exhausted, that part’s true, that part’s been true since forever, he is exhausted from trying to pack wounds that are constantly reopening and from getting sucked into places he never quite left, because as much as he hates to admit it, there are so many places John never quite left. 

John is _still_ with his dad, _still_ trying to survive after leaving, _still_ binging on dark magic until it’s all he’s got, _still_ in Newcastle, _still_ in the next best thing to an electric chair, _still_ in New Orleans surrounded by fire, _still_ losing and burning and dying and breaking and convulsing, and now he’s _still_ in that windowless room with the broken washer and dryer.

And here’s another truth, and it’s that when Behrad said, back when everyone found out, “come on, that’s not fair,” a stupid, childish part of John that shouldn’t exist agreed. 

It’s not fair that it makes sense that this happened to him because he’s John Constantine and why shouldn’t he bring another objectively horrible thing on himself, right? (Why shouldn’t another objectively horrible thing _happen to him?)_

As if it’s not like every bad thing that’s happened to him hasn’t been his fault in some way, right from the very start. 

And yet he can’t stop thinking _it’s not fair, it’s not bloody fair, when am I going to be allowed to stop being sorry and just be happy? Haven’t I had enough punishment for one life?_

He slams his palms against the wall, and the force reverberates through his bones. When he was younger he’d get drunk and he’d get high and he’d consider dying, maybe by caving in his own head, to get rid of the memories, but he’s not a kid anymore and he doesn’t have the privilege of destroying his life without understanding exactly how much worse bad things can get, so he’ll destroy his room instead.

John’s desk, having met a chair intimately not long ago, isn’t much of a desk anymore, not that it was ever much of a desk, considering the lack of space in this room even when he spelled it bigger, but that just makes it easier to overturn.

“God _damn_ it!” he screams, and oh, look, he’s graduated to using his words again, good for him. His mind feels both stormy and perfectly clear, and he’s running out of things to ruin but there’s a cracked mirror on the floor and he picks it up and—

It’s got a hot pink frame. Zari must’ve left it in his room. Zari. She’s here on the ship. He’s here on the ship. The Waverider. The Legends live here. They think John’s one of them.

_I need some back-up here. I need some bleeding help here._

When it happened, John couldn’t even scream for help that wouldn’t come.

_Why didn’t you call for back-up?_

_Go ahead, John. Why_ didn’t _you call for back-up? Admit it, all by yourself._

It’s just as he said. He just said it. He accepted it, he’s accepted it all, he’s accepted things over and over again and he’s accepted this:

He didn’t think he’d need it, and then it was too late. He couldn’t find the time.

That’s how it went, those are the facts.

John looks in the mirror and sees a mess of a person, all flyaway hair and wet red eyes and sickly-pale skin except for flushed cheeks and he’s shaking, breathing so hard he’s heaving. His throat hurts. 

Someone is saying, “John, calm down, calm down, I’m sorry, calm down.”

Ava? Is Sara not here?

Mick is here, though, apparently, because John hears him grunt and say, “Let him.” 

“B, did you get Zari?” Nate asks before Gideon chimes in and says she’s already called, and John is too wrapped up in himself to register the fact that too many people are seeing him lose it again and that he should maybe care about that.

“Wait, Ava—John, hey, hey…” and that’s Zari, and he does regret, a little, that she’s seeing him like this. He hates the ways she’s seen him in the past few months, and hates how much he loves her for sticking around, selfish bastard that he is. How often he swallows down the truth, which is that she shouldn’t waste her time, just because he likes having her around. “John, take a deep breath. You’re on the Waverider.”

And here’s something funny: 

John knows that quite well. 

He’s on the Waverider, and half the time it barely makes a difference in how he feels, but at least he can scream here. He can call for help when he doesn’t even need it.

(And the help he doesn’t need will come.)

John drops to his knees and keels over, pressing his forehead against the floor like he’s praying, and he says, “I know! I’ve noticed! I’m right— _fucking_ —here!” 

He slams a fist against the floor and screams again, and he knows he’s being dramatic, he knows he’s acting like a lunatic, but he doesn’t want to be this way anymore, he doesn’t want any of this to have happened but sometimes _time just wants to happen_ , right? 

Maybe time just wants to fuck John over, maybe that’s why John’s always been so bloody good at time travel, he doesn’t even have to try and he’s somewhere else, just so long as he doesn’t want to be there. “How did I let this happen?” he wonders out loud like he has countless times before, because the question won’t stop haunting him, because he can’t believe any of the answers, _because you haven’t accepted it, John, face it_. “I can’t believe I let this happen.” 

“John,” Zari murmurs, and now he feels her hand on his back, her palm on his vertebrae. “You don’t...I don’t think you let anything happen. You’re not actually the one who hurt you.”

“But I don’t want it to have happened,” John says to the floor. The words are stupid and childish and true. 

Zari’s voice shakes when she says, “I know.” 

Of course she does. She’s heard it all before. A high-pitched, vaguely hysterical sound tears from John’s throat and his eyes are streaming and he feels like he’s convulsing and the whole thing is just ridiculous, he’s ridiculous, he’s in pain, he feels like he’s choking and restlessly he changes his position, hoping it’ll be easier to breathe if he’s not so curled up, and he finds that the tight bomb of beaten-down, rotten, mixed-metaphorical reality inside him has, post-explosion, turned to smoke, and, to his surprise, with each breath he takes it enters the atmosphere. 

He’s lying flat on his back with his feet planted on the floor, staring at the ceiling, and he catches a glimpse of Zari kneeling over him and he grins at her and she looks at him like he’s breaking her heart and it makes him start laughing again.

He turns his head for a moment and catches a glimpse of his teammates—most of them, at least—staring as though they’re ashamed of themselves for staring, standing there awkwardly, and John should be ashamed too. 

In spite of the devastated elation lifting him out of his mind, he should be thinking about how he doesn’t want anyone to see him like this. He certainly shouldn’t want anyone to see him like this. Shouldn’t want anyone to see that no, he’s not all right, and he’s tired of pretending he is when he keeps fucking it up and no one believes him anyway and trying to keep it up drugs him half to death. 

He’s tired of telling himself and letting everyone else think that he’s healing when it still hurts this much and when he’s this angry that it does. 

He shouldn’t want them to know that. 

He should be ashamed right now. 

But he doesn’t give a damn, because _something bad happened to him,_ because _someone did something bad to him_ and he might as well admit it. 

At some point, he has to cut it out with the lies. 

_So why didn’t you call, John?_

John didn’t think to call for back-up, didn’t think of his teammates even once, and by the time it came to mind, it was long over. He was the arrogant bastard he’s always been. 

_Come on. You know better than that._

Well, John didn’t think he’d need back-up, that’s why he didn’t bring any. And that was arrogance. It couldn’t be anything else.

_You sure about that?_

All right, he didn’t think he’d need back-up, so he didn’t bring any, and it was perfectly reasonable to not bring anyone around to a routine exorcism, to just keep the possibility of their support in his back pocket instead.

John didn’t think he’d need back-up because there was no reason to think he’d need it, and that was because he didn’t expect what would happen because why would he, and by the time the other Legends came to mind, it was all over.

 _Oh, you_ sure _about that?_

Fine.

He reached for the comm, of course they came to mind before it was over. But it doesn’t matter, because it was too late, because he didn’t think of it soon enough.

_But how much time did you really have?_

Fine!

John didn’t think he’d need back-up, and then he thought he might, and then it was too late, because it happened so fast. There was no bloody time to find. 

It just happened so fucking fast, and when he says that he isn’t only stating a fact, he is stating a truth.

With all the things that ended up stacked against him, he didn’t stand a chance. The moment it started, it was too late. 

He wasn’t able to even defend himself until he’d already been through the worst of it, and it wasn’t because he didn’t try. The not defending himself until the end, that was trying, that was a _perfectly legitimate course of action._

Because he got caught off-guard like everyone gets caught off-guard sometimes, and there wasn’t much he could do about it, in the end, and, hell, it _wouldn’t_ matter if he’d actually been sloshed, if he actually hadn’t tried to call for back-up. Maybe if he had managed to call for back-up it still would’ve been too late. 

And that’s not how it went, so who cares?

_Wait, wait, come again, Johnny boy. Tell us, why didn’t you stop it? Give us a simple answer. Tell us why you let it happen._

Why didn’t he stop it? 

He couldn’t.

Why did he let it happen?

He didn’t.

It wasn’t his fault.

He looks back up. He tells the ceiling, “It happened too fast.”

Then he covers his face with his hands, and he starts to cry.

Sobs tear from his chest as painfully as the laughter, and he’s making horrible mourning sounds and it’s been years and years since he cried like this. Even when he lost Dez, even when the attack happened, he tried to hold back, covered his mouth and gasped, drunk and miserable in the corner of some room.

Now he’s not holding back, and he’s not trying to stop.

John doesn’t want to stop, so he isn’t going to until he’s done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact, the part of this chapter that starts at John throwing the shot glass to the floor—dubbed (by me), the Cathartic Screaming Breakdown—has been around in some way or another since this story was gonna be "like 7k I guess.” Anyway, what do you think?
> 
> +
> 
> Right, forgot to do the spiel: I appreciate readers, kudos, comments, if you have the time dropping a comment would be great. Man, it's been a long year, hasn't it?
> 
> +
> 
> Chapter 10 - Shop Talk  
> Summary: Practical matters are attended to.
> 
> +++
> 
> NOTE 11/27/2020: If anyone cares/notices--things happened this week and it's possible that I won't get the chance to pretty up/edit the chapter for posting by Saturday, so it might be up Sunday.


	10. Shop Talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Practical matters are attended to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone DID notice, I'm sorry about posting late! Real life, you know. It was a bit of a struggle to get everything down.
> 
> Hope you enjoy this chapter, which could be subtitled "John works through the things he worked through last chapter, but More."

John wakes up to the aftermath of an explosion, flat on his back and floating on the fumes left over. The only thing missing is tinnitus. It doesn’t hurt, at least, even though his eyes are sore and so is his throat, which reminds him that he recently spent a good half hour outright weeping on the floor of his room, and before that...huh. He might have to move back to the library for a bit. Or, more likely, Zari’s room. He hopes he didn’t destroy any important magical artifacts. He’s ninety percent sure he didn’t. He keeps most of those in the library. 

He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He strokes the leather of the sofa, and it feels blessedly real under his hands, though he’s a little disoriented when he realizes that the leather sofa is in the library and he doesn’t remember getting here. Then, he tries.

Someone held their hands out to him. Nate. He took them and stumbled his way up, gasping and wiping at his eyes like he’d just smoked a pack of cigarettes and run a mile. He let go of Nate’s hands, and then there were Zari’s, fluttering around him, resting on his shoulders, ineffectually trying to smooth out wrinkles in his shirt. 

He stumbled when he tried to walk. She took his hand, which shouldn’t have helped with the balance, but did. 

He collapsed onto the couch and stared up at the ceiling. He closed his eyes.

Now he opens them again. 

His chest aches as if all the heavy things inside have been scooped out. He doesn’t hate it. 

+

Zari’s sleeping, and John’s forehead is pressed against her shoulder. It’s been a couple of days since John had his _moment,_ and no one seems sure whether he’s lying or not when he says he’s all right, which he guesses is fair. 

The answer is that John’s never all right, but he feels less crushed and the rotten things inside seem to have mostly been blown to bits. The answer is that John’s had some kind of epiphany, opened his mind to his own mind, and he wasn’t even high.

The answer is that this isn’t and is forever, and thinking of it all makes him want to defend himself, a sentiment that doesn’t make much sense, but here he is. 

“Zari,” John whispers. He doesn’t expect her to wake up, but he should, given what a light sleeper she is. 

“Yeah?” she murmurs, turning to face him, and he winces.

“Sorry, love, didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Then why were you talking to me?”

“Dunno,” John mutters, starting to feel embarrassed. “Was thinking I’d do that thing where you tell your bed partner deep secrets while they’re sleeping.”

Zari laughs, sitting up on her elbows and looking at him. He sits up too. Her eyes are amused. “Your bed partner? Really?”

He gives her half a smile. “I’m not wrong.”

“Fine, you’re not wrong. But you know you can tell me deep secrets when I’m, like, not sleeping, right? I’ve been deep at you while you’re not sleeping.”

John doesn’t mention the times she’s been _deep at him--_ a weird turn of phrase he’d make fun of if he weren’t so preoccupied with feelings that still make little sense, only now about a broader and more truthful variety of things--while she did think he was sleeping, and says, “So have I.” 

“Then do it now,” Zari says, hope sparking in her eyes, burning the remains of sleep away. “Seriously. I’m...I want to know what you’re thinking.” The words are earnest, and John swallows. He reaches out and takes a loose lock of her hair in his fingers. She lets him twist it around. “I’ve kind of been, like, wondering about…” She pauses for a bit, and John fills in.

“The screaming the other day?”

“Yeah, that,” Zari says. “Definitely that.”

“I’m sure you’re not the only one," John jokes weakly. He takes a deep breath and twists his body so that he’s both half sitting up and fully facing her, and she does the same. “Must’ve looked like a total loon, me.”

“That’s not important,” Zari says, and John laughs, because she might as well have said _oh,_ _you definitely did,_ and it’s fair enough, even though it makes John want to ask why she’s still sleeping in the same bed as him. He doesn’t. 

“I did it because I wanted to,” John says. The words are too simple to not mean about a thousand things at once. “‘Cause...no one’s ever let me scream before,” he continues, looking at her collarbone, her lips, her hairline, anywhere but her eyes. “I’ve never let myself scream like that before. Or not, not for a long time. Closest was really the punk days. I needed to scream then.” He sighs. “And I needed to scream now. _Wanted_ to. Yeah, wanted to stop talking so I could understand things I didn’t know I hadn’t. I couldn’t speak then and I think I had to not speak on my own terms.” John is starting to pull Zari’s hair, so he lets go, tucks it behind her ear. “I think I figured something out, Z.”

He finally looks into her eyes, which are dark and shining. She’s listening to everything he’s saying and starting to think that maybe she should be happy about what he’s telling her and she’s beautiful. Among all the things that have changed, that hasn’t. 

“I didn’t let it happen. It happened. It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t me.”

Zari gives him a sad smile. “Yeah, John. You weren’t the person who hurt you.”

John grimaces. He doesn’t correct her on the fact that it was not a person who hurt him at all, not really, because it doesn’t matter as much as it should, because it still means that there was, in some way, _someone else_ involved _,_ not an act of God but of something entirely different. 

He shakes his head. He’s talking, but not about that. 

Thrown off, he soldiers on. “I just mean, it doesn’t matter if I’d done things differently, because it went how it did and everything went wrong, but it wasn’t really my fault. Couldn’t change it now, couldn’t change it then, and I needed to know that all on my own, so I put on some white noise and straightened it out.” John clears his throat. That’s enough. “So. There it is."

"There it is," Zari says, laughing a little, though she sounds tearful in a way that makes John want, for a moment, to take it all back and pull the covers over his head. 

Before he can, she leans forward and presses her lips to his. He opens his mouth to her, and they kiss for a lingering moment. John’s hand travels down her side and to her hip. For a second he considers trying to go further, and his hand twitches. Then a quiet, melancholy part of him whispers that this moment is nice, and let’s face it, Johnny, trying for anything more might ruin it, and John’s hand goes still. When he and Zari part, John just lowers himself down to rest his head on the pillow, and she follows. 

John’s hand is still heavy on her hip, and when he gets a good look at her again in the low light, his heart jumps at the contentment in the way her lips quirk upwards when she looks at him. She reaches out and rubs her thumb over his hairline. Her hand moves gently down to his shoulder, and then, slowly, she moves closer until her arm is wrapped around his waist and she’s able to fit herself against him, her forehead against his chest. 

He pillows his chin on her hair and wonders how she’s even breathing, so curled up against him. He runs the hand on her hip up to her side and then, as he curls in closer, to rest on her back. She doesn’t move, just lets out a contented breath, so she must be breathing fine.

For once, so is he. 

+

It’s been dull the past few weeks. 

Let John edit that: it’s been dull the past few weeks in that there hasn’t been much going on, superheroism-wise. They’ve been traveling around the timestream and there’s been a couple of side missions John wasn’t involved in and he thinks that there might’ve been an anachronism in the 1950s that he QBed on, but he wouldn’t advise anyone to quote him on that. If it happened, he didn’t even try to participate, didn’t so much as go to the debrief. Sara let him.

The special treatment was glaring, and John, even now, doesn’t feel sorry that he took advantage.

The long and short of it is that John, being a selfish bastard, hasn’t been keeping up with or giving a damn about his job other than obsessive stints in the library brushing up on information he might never actually use.

But now that he’s starting to have good days again—and even believing they’re good—he suspects that that’ll change. It does, in the form of Sara and Ava catching up to him while he’s reading in the parlour, having been cruelly removed from the library by an enormous map, about twenty books and papers spread over every available surface, and Nate Heywood, who’s recently drunk his body weight in coffee. John barely escaped before getting caught up in a lecture. 

He peers at them over the top of his book, raising his eyebrows as if he isn’t completely aware that they’re going to do the captain thing at him. He readies himself to promise he’ll actually pay attention on the next mission and participate, no, really, he means it. 

He does, too, but the problem with being a professional liar who’s recently been working a lot of overtime is that it takes more work to be believed.

“Go on, then,” he mutters, and Ava and Sara exchange some kind of look and sit down. Or Ava sits down on the sofa and Sara on the arm of the sofa. John makes the concession of pulling the armchair so that it and he are directly facing the couch.

There’s an extended moment of silent awkwardness. “Don’t tell me you didn’t rehearse this at all,” John says. 

“No, we did,” Ava assures him, and then she frowns, as if she’s not sure if she should’ve said that. 

John rolls his eyes, but he’s not too bothered. It’s been a quiet day. He slept peacefully, though he woke up with Zari still asleep next to him as opposed to Zari waking him up, which meant he’d somehow woken up earlier than her because there’s only so much peaceful sleep John’s body can allow him before sounding the alarms. Still. He woke up half-rested. He’s eaten. He laughed at Nate as he ducked out of the library. 

This is probably a good time to talk about work. Work’s been his life for so long anyway, and he’s sure that he can manage to reassure Sara and Ava that he’s getting it together. For the first time in a long time, John feels some genuine hope about the whole thing, or much of anything at all.

It’d help if his fearless captains would speak, though.

He makes a _go on_ motion with his hand. “Do any of us have all day?” he asks, a thread of irritation starting to weave through his body, and then he sighs. “I’ll start. I’m fine, I’ll be fine, I’ll admit I wasn’t paying much attention when QBing last time with the whole thing in the fifties, but I’m all right now, yeah? If you need a sorcerer, I can do it.” He feels well enough that he can tell himself that his confidence is warranted, though both Ava and Sara look surprised. John feels the thread of irritation get pulled a bit tighter. “What?”

“I mean, that’s what we were going to talk about,” Ava mutters to Sara, and Sara shrugs and turns back to him. Ava continues. “Look, John, it’s great that you’re feeling better, but I think there has to be a game plan here. It’s only been a few days—”

“A few days since what?” John asks, the thread snapping.

Ava looks a little guilty.

“Come on, just say it.”

“Since you started feeling better,” Ava mutters. 

“So you think I’m gonna inevitably get worse again and we’ve gotta, ah, prepare for the eventuality?” John snarls, closing his book. Way to ruin the bleeding _vibe._

“John,” Sara says in an even voice, “it’s not anything against you.” 

John rolls his eyes. “Right, yeah.”

“We just need to put in some safeguards,” Sara tells him. “So an incident like the one on the other mission doesn’t happen again.”

John’s chest constricts, and he swallows hard. “Yeah. Constantine buggering things up like a bloody amateur,” he starts, because he did, he really did, it’s not like there isn’t another world where things went a tiny bit different, one where he paid a bit more attention or maybe moved some to the right and there was no healing to be done because there was no hurt and John doesn’t live in that world because—

“Hey,” Sara says, and John pulls himself out of his thoughts, discombobulated, and does his best to focus on her before she thinks he’s gotten upset and before he thinks he’s gotten upset, because he wants to keep avoiding that, maybe he wasn’t lying after all when he told himself this was fixable. “No. I was talking about the mission with the disappearing act. Not the exorcism. We’re not talking about the exorcism.”

Right. Not talking about the exorcism. Maybe everything that can be learned from that has been learned. And there wasn’t much to learn. Grief rises in his throat, but he swallows heavily, because while he can admit that one crying jag was warranted, any additional ones would be too much. 

He blinks rapidly and nods. “Yeah, mission before last. Right.” The one where they all found out, that one. He clears his throat. “Had the comm on,” he points out.

“You’re not using the comm as an S.O.S. during actual missions,” Sara says. “The idea is to keep it on at all times. To keep the sound on. It scrambles things to have to try and keep track of you. We needed you _there.”_

John grimaces. “Mea culpa,” he mutters.

Sara waves him off. “I get it. I’m not trying to lecture you. I already yelled at you...way too much for what happened.” 

John’s lip twitches. He doesn’t disagree with her. 

“We’re just figuring out what you need,” Ava says. “No judgment.”

She’s earnest enough that John feels more than a little uncomfortable, though it’s not like she’s doing anything wrong. Being downright thoughtful, really. It’s weird.

No judgment. It’s the right thing to say, though John doesn’t know if he’ll ever be sure it’s true. There’s still pity in his teammates’ eyes, his long transformation into being made of glass complete. 

But he does know that he wants to get back in the field and show them that he hasn’t been made useless by this mess, no matter how they feel. 

“I’m listening,” he says magnanimously. Ava and Sara share a look, and John gives them a half-hearted smirk. “You rehearsed with a different John Constantine in mind, didn’t you?” 

He’s right on the money, if Ava’s guilty look and Sara’s good-humored shrug are anything to go by.

“Y’know, strange as it may seem to you,” John tells them, setting his book down, “I believed it when I was told I was still on the team. Even before…” He makes a general gesture at the room. He doesn’t know what he means, but expects that they’ll fill in some meaning, hopefully a heartening one, on their own. “Yeah. So I was expecting this.” He looks over them with a critical eye. “Maybe not Sharpie,” he admits. 

That was a bit up in the air, whether she’d be under the impression that she’d cause him another nervous breakdown and avoid him or understand that her comments were a minor push at most into something that John may or may not have needed. 

_It wasn’t your choice and it wasn’t your fault and there’s nothing you can do about it._

Ava frowns. “Hey, I’ve been—” she starts, and then cuts herself off. “Whatever.” 

John doesn’t ask, suspecting that Zari said something cryptic and reassuring to the others and shrugging it off. He sits up and puts his elbows on his knees, “Change the stage directions, yeah? Edit out the bits where I get the vapors. It’ll cut down the time, and I think we all want that.”

Sara grins. “Okay.” She and Ava exchange another look, and they go serious again. John keeps a poker face.

“I think that, for now, you should stay on the ship as much as possible,” Sara says. “With whoever else is there. Ease back into being in the field.” 

John sighs. He presses the pads of his fingers against his cheekbone. He expected that one. “So I’m grounded.” 

Sara rolls her eyes. “You’re not grounded. If we need our sorcerer, you’ll come in. We just need someone with you at all times. When you’re on the ship and definitely when you’re off. On the ship, it can be Gideon if necessary.” 

“Right, yeah, keep the madman in the attic unless there’s no other options and make sure to keep an eye on him no matter what. Sensible.” It is, actually, considering that John’s spectacular fuck-up on the mission before last probably wouldn’t have happened if he’d been on the ship most of it, couriered in to say his incantation, and then gone right back, and on the missions before, they could’ve done without him in the field. 

John can’t be angry. He’s too busy trying to hide the humiliation of knowing that he has to be not just worked with, but worked around. Too much of a potential hindrance to go on a damn mission whether or not they specifically need his skills. His fingers twitch. 

“John,” Sara says with some exasperation. “One, do not do the face thing. Two, again, this is literally nothing against you and isn’t gonna last forever. You’re working back up to…”

“Being of use,” John says glumly, slowly curling his fingers into his palm and letting his arm fall back to his lap.

“You are of use,” Ava says. “Even if you stay on the ship. I know most of you think QBs don’t do anything, but roughly ninety percent of the time, we end up doing something when QBing, so, like, statistically that makes no sense, but whatever, not the point. I just mean that staying on the ship doesn’t immediately render you useless.” 

“Usually when that happens it’s because the QB has to go into the field, though,” John points out. “The idea here is that there’ll be me and someone else, ostensibly to QB with me but actually because you think I need a babysitter, and if back-up’s needed that doesn’t absolutely require magic, the other ‘QB’ will head out, Gideon’ll play poor man’s minder, and you lot will all secretly wonder if I’m having some kind of episode back on the ship.” John looks directly at Sara and Ava and quirks an eyebrow. “Am I right? Or am I completely right?” 

Sara sighs and throws up her hands. “Fine! You’re right. But seriously, you’re a good strategist, we sometimes use your magic even when you’re not literally in the field, and eventually you’ll…”

“Be part of the team again?”

Sara gives him a flat look. “Less self-pity when we’re literally talking about how you’re part of the team, please.”

John cracks a reluctant smile at that. “Fair enough.” 

“Anyway, start with paying attention to the existence of missions and literally anything that’s happening on them,” Ava chimes in, “because we might actually need your input and the last anachronism was in the thirties, not fifties.”

John snorts. “Touché.” He nods. “All right. I’ll QB and, unlike the vaguely sane on this ship, actually make an effort.” It feels uncomfortably like being on probation, but there’s not much he can do about that but wave it off. 

“The last thing,” Sara says, and John makes a face at her, because he’s pretty done with _things,_ thought they’d made a clunky but actionable plan for however long it takes him to stop being an absolute burden, and yet she continues, “I think it might be a good idea to teach you more self-defense and hand-to-hand. Just some sparring. Nothing big, just with me.”

John shoots a look at Ava, who’s tensed, probably remembering their exchange and wondering if they should’ve taken that part out during rehearsal. John keeps his poker face. His mind is overrun.

It’s true that John’s ability to non-magically defend himself mostly consists of running away very fast, trying to knock people down (and out) before they can knock him down, and then, if that doesn’t work, lying low for a bit to, ha, catch them off-guard, and maybe it would help to know a bit more. How to better break out of holds, he thinks with a pang. Seems like a good idea. It’s a good idea. 

But when it happened, he used a completely legitimate self-defense strategy for the situation. The best one to avoid the worst outcome. 

He wishes he still assumed that if he’d known how to fight harder, fight smarter, fight back with something better than ineffectual struggling and then having to play almost-dead, he could’ve gotten out of it, never mind head injuries and constricted breathing, and...maybe he could’ve. He doesn’t know, does he? He’s not exactly an expert on hand-to-hand combat and defense strategies that don’t involve incantations or body modification. He depends too much on magic; it’s true. If he’d had magic then, if one of his wards had somehow worked against what happened, if—it doesn’t matter. He didn’t have it. 

The idea is that he’d be able to defend himself better when magic’s not enough, and avoid getting tossed around altogether. 

The idea of it now, though, of learning the ways another him might’ve been able to avoid what happened after all makes him woozy. He takes a shallow breath and looks down. His hand goes up to his face like he’s going to run it through his hair, but he hooks his nails into his skin instead. There’s a warm, stinging pressure. It’s a comfort. He’d be able to use magic now, if he wanted to. He has to bring himself back. 

He said he wouldn’t get the bloody vapors and he’s not going to, he’s been doing so well, he did so well, he guesses that this is another reason why they had to have this conversation in the first place. If this is fixable, it’s not even close to fixed—how many more healing realizations? He’d like a set number—so he does the only thing he can think of to try and fix at least this moment and presses his cheek against his fingers, pushes in his nails harder, and starts the familiar, comforting dragging motion before someone grabs his hand and jerks it away from his face. 

John’s head drops hard before it shoots back up. He can feel how wide his eyes are because they’re burning, and, heart racing, he stares at Sara, who has his hand in hers. John’s eyes flit downwards. Their hands are clasped; it looks like they’re going to arm wrestle. A smile twitches over his face, but disappears when he meets Sara’s eyes again and sees the sadness and the worry and the regret. She pushed too far and John can’t blame her because it shouldn’t have been too far. It was only shop talk, but John’s rusty. He will be for a while.

“It’s okay,” Sara says. “We’ll just go with what we talked about first. That was the important part anyway.”

“You don’t have to make exceptions for me,” John tries, the words stumbling out. 

“I make exceptions for everyone, that’s how being a captain works,” Sara responds with a half-smile. She looks to the side and makes a jerking motion with her head, mouthing something, and John hears Ava leave the room. 

Sara puts her attention back to him. “Are you with me?”

John nods, dazed. 

Sara adjusts them so that their hands are still linked, but not in midair like they were. Just resting between them.

“John, before you start thinking that it’s some kind of huge exception and I think that if only you’d taken me up on self-defense classes before, it wouldn’t have happened, I’m gonna tell you that I don’t think that what happened really had anything to do with what you can and can’t do at your baseline. Because at your baseline you are totally capable, even without honing your self-defense, and you know that and I know that.” She snorts, self-deprecating, as if her words didn’t just send John reeling. “You’re not going to believe me, but the only reason I said it was because I thought it’d make you feel safer.” 

John lets out a shaky laugh. “Seems like it should, don’t it?” 

“It’s fine that it doesn’t,” Sara says, voice even. “You’re gonna have back-up, and you’re gonna have magic. I’m not expecting that to go away. Neither should you. You’re going to be okay. You can protect yourself, and if you can’t, we can protect you. You’re safe and you’re going to be safe.” 

“You can’t promise that,” John says. His voice is hushed and shaking. “You obviously can’t.”

“I’m not promising anything. I’m telling you something that I think is going to be true, because we are going to do everything in our power to make it true.”

“Except self-defense classes, apparently,” John says in a thin voice.

“Except self-defense classes, apparently,” Sara agrees. “You’re fine without those.” 

John grinds his teeth for a moment, and then mumbles out, “So if you were just saying that to make me feel safer, it’d mean that you don’t think it would’ve helped if I’d brushed up on self-defense. Learned a few tricks. Whatever. It still would’ve gone like it did.” 

Sara swallows hard, her eyes shining. “I don’t really know, and I don’t think it matters. Even if you could’ve done something else, that doesn’t mean you didn’t do...fine. There’s a lot of ways to win a fight, and there’s a lot of ways to lose one, and sometimes things turn out kind of in between, like this time, and it’s all got to do with a lot of different pieces that are really hard to put together right away, and sometimes you have to do what you have to do.”

“Are you going to say I’m a survivor again? Because you’ve really been milking that one,” John says.

Sara grins, though her eyes are still sad. “Not my fault it just keeps getting truer,” she responds, and her smile fades. Her eyes are glossy, and John’s not sure if she only just realized how horribly sad those words were. He takes her other hand. She tightens her grip and so does he and for a moment they sit together and cut off each other’s circulation.

Then John swallows and whispers, “Not my fault either.” 

“Not your fault either,” she agrees. “But you still made it. From what you’ve said and from what I’ve heard and seen, it sounds like everything went wrong, and then you did everything right to make it through.” 

John lets out a choked sound, and he pulls one of his hands from one of Sara’s to swipe his forearm across his eyes. Sara’s hand twitches, and he says, “Calm down, I’m not gonna do the face thing.”

His voice is frustratingly wobbly, though maybe it’s a blessing, since now most of his attention is on trying not to cry rather than trying to process Sara’s words in somber, semi-stunned silence. He guesses he can do the processing bit later, maybe, after he stops not crying. 

“Okay, okay,” Sara says, and John snorts, because she sounds choked up, and he glances up at her. She is dangerously close to tears, and he shakes his head.

“Get it together, love, you’re embarrassing yourself.”

Sara makes a sound between a sob and a guffaw. “No offense, John, but you’re literally crying, I’m not even crying.” 

“Must be seeing things funny through all the, y’know, tears,” John says.

To be fair, the stress of having to speak instead of spend all her energy holding back tears did make Sara’s spill, so he’s not wrong. For John’s part, though, his voice comes out rough and about three octaves higher. 

Sara shoves his shoulder in response, and she laughs, and he laughs too—at how ridiculous this is, and at how giddy he feels, and at how easily the laughter comes, in spite of the circumstances, and at how surprised he is that he still has this sort of uncomplicated, painless laughter in him, which means he might have more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 11 - Any Old Exorcism  
> Summary: Go team?
> 
> +++
> 
> Hope you enjoyed this chapter! Kudos and comments and so on are appreciated.
> 
> +++
> 
> December 4 2020: Hey, all. If anyone notices, I’m not gonna have the next chapter up Saturday. (Again!) Same problems as last week. Chapter 11 will be up soon.


	11. Any Old Exorcism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Go team?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's back?! And with the last two chapters! (The last one is shorter, so I decided to just post both at the same time like I posted the first two at the same time.)
> 
> Also, regarding the exorcism: I cobbled it together from exorcisms we see in Constantine and Legends, and got the spell and the spelling of the spell from Netflix subtitles. Go with it, pls.

The demon (this demon, not that demon, John reminds himself, though it’s not necessary), twists the cultist’s neck back. It’s too far to be natural, and John feels a pang of sympathy pain. Rough on the body, getting possessed. 

This demon stretches for only a moment, though, getting his puppet’s head to rights in a split second and then staring at John through the cultist’s eyes. 

One of those cheesy demonic grins eats up about half his face, his eyes only flitting across the team hanging around awkwardly as “back-up” for a moment before his gaze fixes on John again. John can almost feel them holding their breaths, or that might be him.

“I’m addressing the entity inside,” he begins, and then this demon waves a hand, spitting out a sharp laugh.

“John Constantine!” he says genially, his voice smooth but piercing, and John falters for half a second. First demon after that mess, and he knows him. What, has he exorcised him before? 

His breath catches. 

What if—?

John shakes his head and clears his burning throat. No, that doesn’t seem right. The eyes aren’t right, the smile isn’t right, the voice isn’t right, and John’s got it together better than this, he’s not gonna let this idiot ramble his way out the room and down the street to start bashing in heads. 

At least his teammates wouldn’t allow that. But that’s if worst comes to worst, and worst isn’t gonna come to worst. John’s not going to bugger this up, not when that’s what everyone expects from him. He’s not broken and he’s not as weak as they think he is.

He lifts up the crucifix. Whatever. It’s not like he really needs the name. However he does it, it’s all objectively easy.

(Last time, he didn’t have to do anything but roll his eyes at the demonic entity’s rambling for a minute, and he got the name on a silver platter. 

Last time, last time, last time, he’s not going to think about last time anymore, he has a job to do.)

This demon laughs and says, again, “John Constantine.” John swallows and opens his mouth, but this demon beats him to it. “You were the talk of the town for a while there! Magister wasn’t gone long, but he did have some fun. Didn’t he?”

Someone gasps. John does not appreciate it, especially considering the spark of amusement it lights in this demon’s eyes. 

John swallows. Blinks slowly. Nothing changes once his eyes are wide open again.

He asks, “Seriously?”

This demon’s grin only widens. 

+

This is how it happens:

Zari makes a face and, through Gideon, asks, “Why is there suddenly a magical signature in our nice, mundane, closed mission?” 

John snorts at the idea of the Legends doing anything mundane, not to mention the idea that magic’s less mundane than chasing a mad scientist with a dinky time machine to a cult in 1930s France, and Zari shoves his shoulder. 

He rolls his eyes, because it’s not like this wasn’t a possibility. No matter the time period, with a cult there’s always a chance of some shit magic and usually a possession or three, so John was preparing for it from the moment the word “Satanic” came up. 

It’s not a cult he’s ever heard of, so he’s assuming that it isn’t exactly a world-ender, but apparently the members weren’t supposed to die today. Or, rather, on a rainy Thursday in Bordeaux in 1934, and their mad scientist certainly wasn’t supposed to get her hands on the shockingly large amount of cash the cult had tucked away, and she definitely was supposed to stay a crackpot rather than actually manage to invent a time machine a couple centuries too early. 

They’re going to have to figure out who helped her build that thing in the first place. 

Well, at least they nabbed her. 

The magical signature, on the other hand...

“Wait, what?” Behrad squawks, and then he groans. “Awesome. No idea where that came from. Where’s it coming from?”

“Where do you think?” John cuts in. “Cellar of our adorable little Satanic fan club.” He scoffs and, as an aside to Zari, says, “I’ll bet anything it was some idiot summoning things to get rid of today’s problem and getting himself possessed instead.” How he managed it is anyone’s guess. Actually, if he’d have managed it without their crackpot is anyone’s guess too. Except, of course...

“Gideon, love, you know anything about a bloke getting possessed today and going on some sort of rampage? ‘Cause if it already happened, that’s out of our hands, innit?”

“Correct, but there is nothing in the original historical record implying a demonic presence in 1934 Bordeaux. On the other hand, in the altered timeline, several murders were committed in the next few days, throwing the city into a panic.” 

John waves his hand. “All right, all right, I get the picture. Not gonna cause some butterfly’s wings to flap out a hurricane getting rid of the wanker.” Ignoring the prickling on his skin, John claps his hands together. “Looks like we’re tacking an exorcism onto this mess.” 

There’s a resounding silence over the comms, and John frowns. “You lot hear me?” 

“Ye-ep,” Behrad says, voice suspiciously high-pitched. 

“An exorcism, huh?” Ava cuts in, and John groans.

(He’ll admit he lost a little bit of patience with her when he found all those “how to help a friend who’s been a victim of sexual violence” pamphlets, though he’s assured he’s being childish half-ignoring her. He agrees, and doesn’t care.) 

John rolls his eyes. Here he’s trying to keep things light and they’re all fussed about an exorcism. “Don’t get weird about it,” he mutters. “I’ve done a million of these.”

(Any old exorcism. He doesn’t know if there’s any-old-exorcisms anymore.) 

More anxious silence, and John snaps, “It’s fine. This is the plan, this is what we talked about. I pop in, check out the situation, take care of it, pop out. The whole madman in the attic trick.”

“You shouldn’t call it that,” Ava mutters, and John snorts.

“And your pamphlets all say there’s no ‘should’ here and something something healing on her own time and something else about boundaries and the long and short of it is I can call it what it is, so shove it, Sharpie.”

Zari smacks his shoulder, and he scowls at her. Someday he might apologize for that; today is not that day. 

“Fine,” Ava grinds out. “You’re right. Get the time courier, we’ll go to the cellar.” 

“Just provide some,” John starts, and his voice fails for a moment before he clears his throat. “Some, uh...” 

Sara cuts in, then. “Some back-up, yeah, of course.” 

“I won’t need it,” John says. “But just in case.”

There’s agreement over the comms, and Zari puts a hand on his shoulder. He shoots her a look, and she gives him a small smile. 

He nods.

He can do this.

And they’re off. 

+

_Seriously?_

John's getting dizzy. The tension in the room is the kind that not even a knife would be able to cut, though a chainsaw might do. John clutches the crucifix more tightly, and lifts it up. A shadow of pain flits over the demon’s face, and his borrowed body starts to tremble. All right. Time for John to be efficient. 

John feels more than a little ridiculous, everyone watching this, but he doesn’t have time for self-consciousness, not unless he wants this idiot to keep going on, and he doesn’t.

He really doesn’t. 

He needs to stop shaking. He needs to think.

The literal magic words are on the tip of his tongue. He’s known them for years, said them for years. That isn’t going to change. 

He knew them then too, he reminds himself. He was capable of sending the bastard back to Hell, in spite of everything, and anyway, this room’s so much bigger, and the sequence of events doesn’t track for a repeat of what happened. John doesn’t need more time. He lifts the cross up higher. He can feel the way that everyone wants to say something but doesn’t want to distract him either. John is not usually so easily distracted. 

This demon gives him a twisted smile, “Something got your tongue?”

John feels a wave of nausea crash over him. Nothing had his tongue. Something had him gagged. 

“Bugger off,” he grits out, not able to help bristling. He shouldn’t talk, shouldn’t encourage this demon, but he’s always had a talent for running off at the mouth. “You’re not getting what you want.”

“Hm,” this demon says, “well, rape was always a bit gauche for me, yeah.”

“Fuck,” John hears in the background, and there’s the unmistakable sound of Rory’s gun heating up.

“Sh,” John says harshly, half over his shoulder, “don’t step in. I need you, I’ll ask. Don’t need the demon’s puppet burnt to a crisp. Trust me.”

There’s silence and a distinct lack of shooting flames. Good. 

This demon laughs again, taking a step forward. There’s hope in his eyes, as if he really thinks that there’s some way he can get away with this as long as he needles enough. _What if he can?_ a traitorous, panicky little part of John wonders. _Why are you taking so long?_

“Look at you, Constantine,” this demon taunts. “I barely believed it when I heard, but here you are, washed up, ruined, brought low by one of those demons you’re so quick to demean. I guess you’re only human, aren’t you?” 

Another step forward. It’s a slow, deliberate step, and it reminds John of the fact that he’s got his crucifix trained on this demon, sapping the wanker’s energy. John’s got everything he needs for a quick, neat exorcism. There’s no reason for this to be making John’s heart beat so erratically when it’s clearly just a mildly clever demon taunting him. Like when demons used to bring up Astra. 

John’s not gonna fall for this. 

He’s going to do his job, because he can, because he can do exactly what he could do before it happened, even with the paranoid inclusion of his teammates, who he isn’t going to need after all. 

“Weak,” this demon says darkly, “damaged. Broken, even. I hear you didn’t do a damned thing, that at the end, all your knowledge was worthless.”

At those words, something breaks. 

No, not John. 

But the icy panic that’s started crawling through his veins warms, replaced by pulsing magic, and the walls he didn’t notice had been put up between him and _the greatest sorcerer who ever lived_ —oh, those break pretty good. 

Now John, every part of John, is brutally present, and every part of John knows that this isn’t going to go wrong.

He’s the one with the crucifix. He’s the one with the incantation. It’s been some three minutes, longer than most exorcisms would last but much shorter than the one before, and he has time, and no need for it. 

With John and and the superfluous Legends here, this demon doesn’t stand a chance, and he knows it, so he’s just trying to bother John out of doing his job, and it’s pathetic.

John knows what he’s doing, and he has all the power here. And it doesn’t matter what this demon knows, or the things he’s saying, because John’s heard it all before. 

He’s told himself every single thing this demon’s telling him, and much, much worse. 

_Here you are._

John loosens his body, pulls the crucifix closer to his chest, and then stretches his arms out again, his clear mind and the magic sparking at his fingertips making the demon stumble and hiss. 

John says, “So you’ve forgotten who I am, mate.” He laughs. “Who cares? I haven’t.”

And then he says, just like he would in any old exorcism, “Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus—”

This demon doubles over, snarling, and tries to choke something out, but John’s much stronger than all that. 

(John evens out his breathing so that he’s barely breathing at all, even as his heart beats wildly. The body that the demon Magister took over is done doing what he wanted, and he thinks John’s passed out, which is exactly what John wanted him to think. 

John doesn’t have the energy to try for an exorcism without his crucifix, and that would involve a sickening amount of closeness anyway, but the good news is that the crucifix is right there, digging into his hip, and John lies on the concrete floor with his eyes closed and his head pounding and spinning, and the demon picks his chosen body up, the heavy hand slipping from John’s face. 

John opens his eyes. 

John sees an ankle in front of him, and he grabs it and, with all the strength he’s got, which shouldn’t be much except the adrenaline’s kicked in, pulls it towards him. And down the body goes, flat on its back. 

Shaking convulsively, bleeding sluggishly from multiple places, and not yet dressed, John scrambles inelegantly to his knees and punches the demon’s suit’s nose in, ignoring the jolt of pain it sends up his arm. 

It’s enough to discombobulate Magister, at least, and John places a palm on the prisoner’s chest and grabs the crucifix he’s had with him for safe-keeping this whole bloody time with the other hand and, barely even thinking about it, manages to dredge up his traitorous, useless magic, and make it be of use after all. 

The demon roars with anger, already weakened by the crucifix near him, and says absolutely nothing, does absolutely nothing, because John speaks before he can. “Magister,” he intones, because throwing the name in there at least gives the other half of this whole mess a fuck-up of his own, and it does make an exorcism easier when John’s not at his sharpest. “Exorcizamus te. Omnis immundus spiritus…” The meat suit’s eyes begin to glow red, and he writhes, but John scrambles back, stumbling to his feet, and keeps it up. “Omnis satanic potestas.” 

Hellfire veins begin to glow under the skin of the poor, unknowing sod the demon took over, and John keeps his distance. A trail of blood runs down his bare leg. He ignores it.

“In nomine virtute…”)

“...exorcisazo te!” John incants, and the cultist’s body, no longer exuding Hell-red light, drops to the floor.

John gasps, stumbling back a bit. To himself, he mutters, “What a rush.”

Only it seems that the rush went right to his head, because when he tries to turn around, everything goes wobbly, and, after a display of floaty lights explode in front of his eyes, dark. 

+

“He’s coming back,” someone says, and John, who’s been drifting in something like an empty ocean, quite bored, opens his eyes.

Behrad’s face is the first one he sees, too close to his own. 

“Hey!” Behrad says, body thrumming with excitement, and John blinks rapidly. 

“Hey,” he mutters, and then he sits up, remembering what happened, and looks around. Everyone’s here, of course, and John’s shaking, the adrenaline of the un-botched exorcism still electrifying him and the sliminess of this demon’s—the other demon’s words sloughing off of him. His teammates are giving him wary but hopeful looks, like they’re not sure whether this is a good situation or a bad one. 

Zari takes a step towards him and tentatively rubs his shoulder. He grins at her. Slowly, she smiles back. “I didn’t bugger it up,” John says breathlessly. “It went perfectly.” He shakes his head. “It went _horribly,_ but it went _perfectly!_ It was normal. I’m normal again.” 

Before John can say anything about magic bullets, Sara says, “Okay, slow down, Rambo. We can talk about that later.”

John feels a bit deflated at that, but he refuses to let himself stop riding this high. “Whatever,” he snaps, waving her off, and Zari squeezes his shoulder. 

“I’m not saying you didn’t do great,” Sara assures him. “You did great.”

“Better than anyone thought I would,” John says, the words both smug and accusatory. 

Sara tilts her head in concession. “Considering the circumstances.”

“Yeah, do you want to, like, talk about that?” Ava asks. “The circumstances.”

John gives her his flattest, least friendly look. “Three guesses, Sharpie. First two don’t count.”

He might dream about it later, and the crushing humiliation of the idea of demons knowing what happened might knock him flat, but for now he’s fine. For now, he feels stronger than he has in a long time, assured that his magic’s still there for him. In spite of the circumstances. He at least has that. This time, there’s a true and undiluted happy ending to hold onto, and he’s not going to forget that.

Zari, who thinks he can’t see her out of the corner of his eye, makes a cutting motion across her throat with the side of her hand at Ava, who puts her hands up. “Okay, okay, I get it.”

Nate comes up to him after that and starts fiddling with the IV John’s been ignoring is in his arm. 

“What’s this, then?” he asks, and Nate snorts.

“You fainted,” he explains, which John already knew, though, to be fair, he hasn’t really been thinking about that. “Because apparently you haven’t eaten or had water in like three days.”

“I’ve been busy,” John says, mostly relieved that the diagnosis has nothing to do with complicated emotions. 

Nate nods. “Yeah. Trust me, that doesn’t make your body stop needing fuel.” He brightens. “Good news is we’re having a post-mission pizza party later!” 

John groans. He still can’t believe Nate made that a thing. “Oh, you’re kidding me. After I passed out and everything? Can’t I just stay here and sleep?”

“No, the whole point is food,” Nate says. “And team bonding.”

“It’s a little much, mate,” John mutters, though he’s going to cave in about three minutes anyway, since he feels kind of foolish for punctuating his successful exorcism with a fainting spell. 

Nate removes the IV. “Too bad!”

John rolls his eyes. “Yeah, too bad.”

He complains when Zari drags him to the galley later on, but only out of habit.

+

At one of the bigger galley tables, John quietly watches the others interact, and breathes deeply. It’s been a long day, maybe even a little overwhelming, and he’s tired, but not ready to sleep. Even with Zari there, he’s not sure he can avoid nightmares or thinking of the details of the mission and of what happened _then_ , the way he bled as he picked himself off of the floor, the way he stared at the body Magister had taken over, once it had all ended, wishing he could kill him and knowing he couldn’t and he wouldn’t. 

He told himself to forget the name, because in the end it was just another demon. He stumbled around, pulling his trousers back up, trying to button his ruined shirt, _is getting the job done enough_ …

A hand over his, and John starts. His other hand detaches from his face when he turns to look at Zari. She cocks her head at him, and he cocks his head back, which makes her smile. He puts his hand down and clears his throat. “Right, yeah,” he mutters, and he doesn’t even have to look up to know everyone’s staring at him. He gives them all a twitchy smile. “Don’t like what you see?” he jokes.

“No, no one’s really all that into the...face thing,” Behrad says, waving his hand over his own face.

Embarrassed, John mumbles, “Sure, yeah, well, I’m not doing it all that much anymore, so.”

“Maybe we should talk about that at some point,” Nate says, and John narrows his eyes at him.

“Have you been reading pamphlets too?”

Nate looks a little guilty, and John rolls his eyes. “Wow,” he mutters, bristling a bit, as if whatever research the others have done hasn’t probably been a help in making them less bloody annoying about everything, not including right now, which is starting to feel like an intervention. He scoffs. “So, what, now you’ve got thoughts on the whole thing?” 

He feels uncomfortable at the idea, but more irritated than anything, and, frankly, he wants to know what they know. Or what they don’t.

“Well,” Nate says before cutting himself off.

“Go ahead,” John says, and Nate sighs.

“We’ve kind of been assuming the scratching thing was to...make yourself less attractive?” Nate says tentatively, and, for a beat, John stares at Nate and then his other teammates, whose expressions range from mildly amused (Mick) to kind of weirded out (Zari) to wary and serious (everyone else). Then he stares for another beat. 

Then he bursts into laughter. 

_“What?_ Are you serious? That’s—” John’s sentence is interrupted by wheezing, and he realizes that most of the people at the table have tensed, probably remembering what happened last time he started laughing uncontrollably, but he’s too busy laughing uncontrollably to care. Turns out he’s still giddy with the successful mission earlier, and this is too funny to be mad at. “That’s _hilarious._ What, you think this is—you think I think it had anything to do with whether I’m attractive? Mate, you’ve seen the way those things go, I was just there, trying to send him back to Hell. If he wanted to get frisky I was his best bet, didn’t have nothing to do with how I looked.”

“Well, yes, and that’s a very healthy way of seeing it,” Nate says in half-hearted explanation, and John lets out a peal of laughter at the words, “but feelings don’t always make sense and we didn’t know exactly how you felt about that aspect, and since it’s your face...”

“Thought your doctorate was in history, old son, didn’t know you were so confident about your skills in pop psych these days,” John gasps out, putting his hand on his chest as though his heart can’t take the sheer hilarity of this absurd situation. He shakes his head. “I don’t blame myself for, what? Tempting him with how I was dressed? Should’ve known how the denizens of Hell feel about trench coats?” 

“Ohhh my God,” John hears Ava exclaim at that, her voice thin, and it makes John nearly shriek with mirth, finally doubling over as best as he can and putting his forehead on the table.

“Can’t tell me that’s an inappropriate thing to say, Sharpie,” he heaves out, suddenly not caring about the fact that his teammates have done actual research into his situation. Really, it’s more adorable than anything. “Everyone deals with trauma in their own way, ain’t that what the pamphlets say? Some of us—some of us use humor to—to _cope!”_ Mick lets out a bark of laughter in response, and John cackles, encouraged. 

“Tell me more—” John’s words are eaten up by gasping laughter, but he manages to soldier on. “‘Bout how I’ve been—been doing it to make myself less attractive _—ha!_ Did we drop into a bloody soap opera while I was blitzed, is that it? Are we in...are we in sodding _EastEnders?_ Christ!” 

“Okay, okay, so the hypothesis has been disproven,” Nate says, his voice shaking with suppressed laughter, and John lifts up his hand just so he can make it into a fist and bang it on the table. There’s an undignified snorting sound from next to him, and then the table’s overtaken by waves of laughter ranging from disbelieving to somewhat horrified to flat-out happy, and John lets it wash over him. He even decides to throw them a bone. 

“I do it because,” John starts, and then he wheezes, barely able to catch his breath, high on the feeling of not caring, for a moment, about how many things still hurt, and on knowing for a fact that he’s still more than capable of being the person he’s being right now. “I do it ‘cause—I can still _feel_ —I can still feel his hands on my face—sometimes—and! Ha! And when I try to get ‘em off—I end up all—” John makes a vague gesture at his face, and there’s a pause in the waves of laughter across the room, though John is still shaking and giggling into his hands. “‘Sides, it makes sense to still have injuries from the damn thing, right? Otherwise why would it still hurt?” He snorts. “Less attractive,” he repeats to himself. “See? Ain’t got nothing to do it with it.”

“Okay,” Nate says, and his voice is still wavering with good humor, but he’s not laughing anymore. “But that’s...that’s _also_ sad.”

For whichever reason, that’s the funniest thing John’s ever heard, and he somehow breaks into renewed peals of laughter, head in his hands. Finally, he’s just chuckling a bit, wiping at his eyes. The laughter around him has dampened, but the light-heartedness in the atmosphere hasn’t entirely died off, and he basks in that even though he’s sure they’re pitying him again. Whatever. At least for a while, even reminded of what happened, they didn’t. 

“You lot are really something,” he says, shaking his head and looking up at flushed faces and shining eyes and relieved smiles. He feels, for a moment, a surge of fondness maybe verging on love for the people with him, in all their well-meaning, inexplicably affectionate glory, all these people who _keep trying_ , and he doesn’t even mind the ways they keep screwing it up, and he lets himself chase the feeling, catch it and keep it with him, and breathe easy. 

After a long pause, Sara, a little reluctantly, starts to say something, but she stops when John holds up a hand. 

“Don’t. Don’t ruin it,” he tells her, because if this moment has to end it might as well end on his terms. “You really wanna talk about the serious shite—maybe I’ll humor you next time I feel like it, but I don’t feel like it. What happened to me ain’t gonna go away, so just. Let it be funny for a moment, yeah? Let me have that.”

To their credit, they do, and silence falls over them all again, more pensive than before. It starts to verge on awkward, right up until Ava says, “We should have a game night.”

It’s a non sequitur, and John looks up and raises his eyebrows at her. “Really? Game night? You get that idea from a pamphlet?”

Zari shoves his shoulder again, and Ava looks irritated and a little guilty until she realizes John’s grinning, and then she rolls her eyes. “Are you ever gonna let the pamphlet thing go, you jerk?”

“No, never, not a chance,” John responds, and Ava groans. Sara pats her shoulder sympathetically. “But,” he continues, standing up, “why not? Let’s do bloody game night.”

Ava brightens, and John smirks at her, jerking his head towards the parlour. 

“D&D?” Nate asks hopefully, and John nods.

“It’s been a while since I played,” he says, “but I’m sure I’m still the best out of you lot.”

“You wish, Trench Coat,” Mick grunts, pushing past John, and John finds a seat, back against the wall, everyone in his line of sight. 

They settle in.

John rolls the dice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Annnnnd, drumroll please...


	12. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Three days later, give or take one or two...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Incidentally, I posted chapter 11 at the same time as this one, so if you've been reading regularly and gone right to the end, you'll want to click back one.
> 
> And we're off!

John grins at Zari, his hands on her hips, and kisses her. She kisses back eagerly, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. They’re in her room, but they decide to forgo the bed and end up on the floor together. Zari lets out a delighted laugh, and John feels his heart soar. Finally, finally. He can do this. She’s willing to do this with him, and his body is telling him, quite enthusiastically, that he’s willing to do this with her.

Maybe he’s still riding the high of the mission and the somewhat cheerier atmosphere on the ship, but it doesn’t matter, because he feels good. He wants this.

Zari’s straddling him, and she pauses and says, through heavy breathing, “Maybe we should switch positions.”

John frowns. He and Zari usually just go where their hearts (or other parts entirely) take them when it comes to how they shag, not much talk of mechanics. Not much talk at all.

It takes a beat for John to realize that last time they were in this position, he let slip what happened, and not really in a dignified way. He feels a rush of shame.

After everything, all this time, she still thinks he’s going to have some kind of episode when they shag, like some kind of bloody...

“It’s fine, love,” John murmurs. “I’m all right.”

Zari nods, and she’s a good enough liar that John isn’t sure if she believes him or not.

John’s heart is starting to pound in his head, too fast, and he reminds himself that last time he got this far and further with Zari, it wasn’t the position that botched it. It was the hand over his face, because when it happened John was mostly on his front, though there was a moment where he was lying on his back and the demon’s meat suit was staring down at him with hunger, and that was when John’s mouth got covered, and John’s breathing picks up.

“Oh, no,” Zari says, and she scrambles off of him. “I’m sorry.”

Without Zari to hold onto, John’s fingers scrabble at the floor, and he takes in a deep breath that turns long and shallow and rasping instead. He sits up and scrambles back, pressing himself to the wall. But he was fine, earlier. Then again, he wasn’t cornered earlier, and even now he doesn’t know if he’s going to be able to get out of being cornered this way, and after everything’s been going so well. John can’t let this happen again, and he puts his hands to his face, his nails catching on his skin, and Zari says, “Wait, John, wait!”

Her voice is unfamiliar in the place that’s started to pull John away, but, he notes, familiar where he really is. Not long ago, he was in Zari’s room on the Waverider.

Right, yeah. He’s still there. He’s still on the Waverider, and that matters a lot.

He runs his fingers down his face, forgetting to dig in his nails, and presses his hands against the floor, pressing his fingertips into one of Zari’s many rugs. He shakes his head hard and then, through blurred vision, looks around and soon meets Zari’s eyes. They’re dark and wide and worried. He thinks there’s regret in her expression, and it makes his stomach twist.

( _Wait, John, wait._

For how long?)

“Bollocks,” he says.

She says, “Let’s sit on the bed. I mean, not to—not to do anything. Obviously. Just, it’s more comfortable. Or we can stay here. On the floor.”

The clear concession to the fear he’s supposedly feeling makes John, leaden limbs and all, scramble to sit on the side of the bed, and Zari lifts herself from the floor with more grace and sits down next to him. He’s pathetically glad that she hasn’t left, even though there’s no reason to think she will, all things considered. But she’s not on top of him anymore, and he has to admit that probably no one is going to be on top of anyone tonight.

He feels another rush of shame. He guesses it doesn’t matter whether or not his mind’s here if his body isn’t.

“Fuck,” John says miserably, hanging his head and pressing the heels of his hands against his forehead. “Fuck.” He pauses. “The opposite of fuck, actually, innit?”

Zari coughs out what might be a stifled laugh, and tentatively puts her hand on the back of his neck, moving her thumb in circles at his hairline. The touch makes him shiver, and Zari pauses.

“Don’t stop,” John says, and she starts up again.

“John, it’s okay,” Zari starts, and John barks out a laugh.

“Nothing about this is okay, Zari. I thought I was better. Everything went—it went so bloody well.”

“You are better, and it did go well, I’m really proud of you.”

“All I did was my job,” John says, because the pride’s starting to feel pathetic, with the rush of it all seeping away. “And now this again. Can’t get back to normal. Haven’t gotten back to normal.” John jerks his right hand away from his forehead to press the pads of his fingers hard against his cheekbone.

“Don’t,” Zari says, voice a mix of gentle and commanding. “There’s nothing there, and you’re okay, you’re with me.”

Fine. She’s not wrong.

John relaxes his fingers before he can start digging his nails into his cheek, forcing his hand back up so that he’s just got his head in his hands again. Skin unbroken.

“Don’t make sense that this is still...” He trails off, trying to take a deep breath. It’s harsh, almost a gasp.

“It’s normal,” Zari tells him. “After what you went through.”

John scoffs. “What I went through,” John mutters. “Didn’t I turn a page, though? Could’ve sworn I turned a page.” _Slow down, Rambo._ John groans.

Slow down, don’t get ahead of yourself, these things take time.

Time is not on his side here, hasn’t been since it happened. Either too fast or too slow or, somehow, both.

Zari leans her shoulder against his, and John feels a surge of guilt. He can’t seem to get himself together, even when he does, and it seemed logical that it’d work this time, it’d be better this time, because they’ve held back, he’s held back, for so long, and he loves Zari for sticking around, but he’s got to love her enough to let her know she can leave. He’ll be all right.

He pulls away so that he can turn to look at her, some distance between them, though their knees are still touching, and, after making an alarmed little sound when he dislodges her, Zari does the same. She furrows her brow, a wary expression on her face, like she’s not sure what he’s going to say or if she’s going to like it, but these days no one spends time with John Constantine if they want to stay away from uncomfortable truths, and this is important.

“You’ve got to be sick of this,” John says, which isn’t what he meant to say, but he doesn’t know what he meant to say, so he’ll go with it. “I’m sick of this. And if after all this time and all this...work...I still can’t...what’s the point, right? That’s why we even got together in the first place, and now I’m just too much of a mess for it and, come on, love, one step forward two steps back isn’t exactly...a recipe for a good time.” He pauses, thinks over what he just said, and feels a stab of annoyance at himself for not being clearer. He’s an adult. He clarifies. “Shagging, I mean. I’m. Talking about shagging.”

Zari puts a hand over her face briefly to try and hide a laugh, and John feels a bit offended. Here he is, giving her an out, and she’s laughing at him.

“John,” Zari says, and John feels a bit thrown off at the fondness in her voice. “Haven’t we had this conversation?”

John frowns. “Have we?” Maybe those blows to the head did more damage than he thought. Then again, half of the past few months have felt like deja vu, so who knows.

Zari frowns back. “Huh. Maybe not? But I swear I’ve told you, like, multiple times that I want to be with you, right?”

John shrugs. “Yeah, but now this? Again? I just know that it’s...it’s a bitch, and I’m still having trouble shagging, of all things, and I understand if this is it.”

Zari rolls her eyes with feeling, and John scowls, even though this conversation is going, John admits to himself, probably exactly how it was going to go.

_It helps. To sleep with you._

Zari reaches a hand out to him, and for a moment he tenses, wondering if she’s going to cover his mouth, which he knows he isn’t ready for and may never be, but of course she doesn’t. She cups his cheek. He turns his cheek to press more firmly against the palm of her hand.

“John,” Zari says gently, “I’m super confused.”

John, taken aback, since he thinks he’s been pretty clear, asks, “How so?”

“No offense, but it’s been literal months since we’ve gone all the way. Do you seriously think I’ve been with you all this time thinking about how much I want to have sex?”

John isn’t sure whether to feel hurt at that, but he does deflate a bit. Now that he thinks about it, he is kind of acting like Zari’s just been impatiently waiting on him to get it together so they can have sex. Or not-so-impatiently waiting on him. And, no, he’s never really felt that way, not until now. Not being able—not being willing?—to shag isn’t exactly a topic he hasn’t spent a hell of a lot of time thinking about, but he’s never felt like it’s all Zari wants. That wouldn’t make sense.

“I see your point,” John admits, and Zari gives him a serious nod, removing her hand from his cheek and patting his knee like she’s humoring him in his coming to a conclusion that was already plainly correct. He gives her a flat look. “Then why are you still here, again? Love, there’s no obligation.”

Zari makes a disgusted face at that. “Uh, ew, John, of course there’s no obligation, what the hell? Do you seriously think _that?_ Still?”

 _No, but I’m afraid I should,_ John swallows back. He looks down, ashamed.

It just seems so thankless, sometimes, the idea of being with him, so he was excited about being excited, excited to finally give Zari something she wanted, and he ruined it, and his mind scrambled, and he feels ugly and useless enough that he feels like he ought to stop holding her heart hostage, even if that’s not what he’s doing.

“Hey! Pay attention to me,” Zari says, and John obeys, pulling himself out of his thoughts, since at least he can do that for her. She continues, “I didn’t stay with you to be a good person. Or out of obligation. I’m not here right now because I’m a good person. I’m here right now for you. That’s it. I hope you do actually know that.”

John licks his lips and tastes nothing but his own skin and Zari’s mint chapstick, and it seems a bit ridiculous, the idea that she’s here for him, and the fact that yes, he knows it, despite recent events.

It all seems strikingly lucky, for a man like him.

“Z, I’m not well,” John tries, because that’s true. He’s never been.

Zari shrugs. “I’m not always well either,” she murmurs. “But...you’re still with me.”

Disbelieving, John asks, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Zari strokes her thumb along his kneecap, her cheeks flushed. She lets out an embarrassed laugh, and John shakes his head, scooting past the moment to clarify, “It’s not that I don’t want to do this with you, love, because I really, really do. But...” He huffs and goes silent.

“It’s okay,” Zari says, sounding exasperated. “Seriously, I don’t want to do anything until you’re ready.”

John grimaces. “It just seems like a bit of a sacrifice to keep making.”

Zari gives him a blithe shrug, and says, lightly, “I’ll make it for you.”

John can’t help but crack a smile at that, but then he sighs. “Feels like it’s time to move on, is all.” It’s just that things have gotten better...

“And yet here you are,” Zari says, and John barks out a laugh.

“And yet here I am, acting like a bloody rape victim.”

Zari makes a wounded sound, and John grimaces, ducking his head. “Sorry,” he mutters.

“Don’t be,” she says quickly. “Don’t.” And then, as quickly as the other words, she says, “I love you.”

John’s head shoots up, eyes wide. Zari winces, but there’s hope in her eyes, and she shrugs one shoulder in a gesture like _what can you do?_

Frankly, that’s a great question.

 _Since when?_ he wants to ask, but the question is ridiculous. There’s a long silence, and then Zari says, “Okay, that can’t have been cringe enough for you to just look at me like that. It’s…” She swallows. “It’s not like you have to say it back.”

“Well, I should hope you already know,” John blurts out, and Zari lights up so bright that he’s taken aback. She’s looking at him starry-eyed, and no one should ever look at John Constantine like that, ever, but he’s all right with it. That’s the truth of it. He’s all right with it, because she’s looking at him and not everything he’s been through. She loves him, specifically, and he might as well let her.

John told himself he’d never fall in love again, but that’s what he tells himself every time, and in this moment he banishes the feeling of dread that comes with happiness, and he’s pretty much successful.

He still says, though more warmly than the words deserve, “Just don’t want you to sell yourself short, love.”

The light in Zari’s eyes turns burning and intense, and it makes John’s breath catch.

Voice low and brimming with confidence, she says, “Don't insult me."

A slow smile spreads over John’s face, and, body loose, he leans forward.

Before they kiss, he tells her, “I'll do my best.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...fun fact, the working title for this fic, way way way at the beginning, was "And He's Off." Not sure exactly what I meant by that, but it sounded atmospheric. Other working titles: "This Is How It Happened/Here's How It Happened" (no kidding, haha) and "Don't Like What You See."
> 
> Anyway! 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, following, commenting, and/or kudosing this fic—and please consider leaving some feedback! I’d really appreciate it. :)


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